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Free copies of this guidebook are available to qualified donors.Nonprofit organizations may access a free pdf at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org.

A Guide for donors

The P

hilan

thro

py Roundtab

le

PR E PARED FOR

THE PH I L ANTHROPY ROUNDTAB L E

BY

PUB L I C IM PACT

This guidebook was comple t ed by

Julie Kowal, Bryan C. Hassel, and Sarah Crittenden.

Dana Brinson and Jacob Rosch also contributed.

Table of Contents

Letter from The Philanthropy Roundtable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

I. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11The Promise of Charter SchoolsNew Opportunities, New ChallengesThe Need for Small- and Mid-sized FundersA Word of Caution

II. Five Strategic Priorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

III. Building aRobust Supply ofHigh-quality NewSchools . 23Support for Individual SchoolsInvestments in BrandsContributions to Intermediaries

IV. Priming the Human Capital Pipeline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37New School LeadersOutstanding TeachersOther Human Capital NeedsNew Thinking about Labor-Management Relations

V. Addressing Critical Operational Challenges . . . . . . . . 51Facilities Financing and DevelopmentBack Office ServicesSpecial EducationBoard Development

VI. Defining and Improving Quality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65Improved AuthorizingCollection and Dissemination of Data and ResearchDefinitions and Standards of Quality

VII. Forging Charter-friendly Public Policies . . . . . . . . . . . 85Building Grassroots SupportSupporting State-level Organizations that AdvocateStrong Charter Policies

Supporting Nationwide Information and Advocacy

Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s

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VIII. The Next Phase of Philanthropic Support . . . . . . . . . . 97Big Hopes for the Big EasyChartering GracelandReaching the Tipping Point

IX. Eleven Big Ideas in Need of Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105Idea 1: Leverage charter schools as the leading edge ofhuman capital reform.

Idea 2: Identify and support promising charter leaders fromminority communities.

Idea 3: Create a multibillion-dollar facilities fund.Idea 4: Fund the development of a “virtual” shared backoffice platform.

Idea 5: Devise sector-wide achievement metrics.Idea 6: Incubate school-turnaround organizations.Idea 7: Ensure equal access for charter schools in the pre-K sector.Idea 8: Identify and support promising models to serve thehardest-to-reach student populations, including studentswith special needs, drop-outs, and juvenile offenders.

Idea 9: Harness charter school flexibility to create a viablecurriculum-development sector.

Idea 10: Research the charter sector’s “known-unknowns.”Idea 11: Identify and cultivate a pool of charter-friendlypolicy leaders.

Appendix A: Projects Referenced . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Appendix B: Funders Referenced. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

About The Philanthropy Roundtable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Becoming a Member . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

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Letter fromThe Philanthropy Roundtable

The Philanthropy Roundtable is delighted to publish this guide-book, prepared by Public Impact, on how philanthropists can bestsupport the charter school sector.

The Roundtable is committed to helping donors achieve dramat-ic breakthroughs in the improvement of K-12 education—an area inwhich many charter schools have proven themselves especially effec-tive. Nearly 18 years after the nation’s first charter law was passed inMinnesota, 40 states and the District of Columbia now have charterschool laws and more than 4,000 charter schools serve over 1.4 mil-lion students—about 3 percent of the nation’s public school popula-tion. Families continue to clamor for more charter schools, lining upon long waiting lists for the chance to enroll their children.

Today, a new set of challenges confronts the charter school sec-tor and its supporters. To be sure, charter schooling remains one ofthe nation’s most promising efforts to produce more excellent pub-lic schools, especially for low-income and minority students. Thequestion is now one of expansion: How can donors help take thebest of the charter sector to scale—while at the same time maintain-ing high standards of quality? To address these emerging questions,The Philanthropy Roundtable commissioned this guidebook.

The Philanthropy Roundtable gratefully acknowledges the gen-erous support of the Bodman Foundation, the Annie E. CaseyFoundation, the Pumpkin Foundation, and the Walton FamilyFoundation for making this guidebook possible.

The Philanthropy Roundtable holds public meetings around thecountry where donors can exchange ideas, strategies, and best prac-tices. We also offer customized private seminars, at no charge, fordonors who are thinking through how they can make the greatestdifference in their giving. Please contact us at 202.822.8333 or [email protected] if youwould like further information.

Adam MeyersonPresident

Stephanie SarokiSenior Director

K-12 Education Programs

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Acknowledgments

This publication was based in large part on conversations with rep-resentatives from philanthropic organizations currently investing inthe charter school sector. We were also privileged to talk with otherpeople working directly in the charter school field. We are gratefulfor the time they took to share with us their insights and sugges-tions. Thanks to Emary Aronson, Robin Hood Foundation; BetsyBikoff and Claire Fiddian-Green, Richard M. FairbanksFoundation; Jim Blew and Cathy Lund, Walton Family Foundation;Phoebe Boyer, Tiger Foundation; Katherine Bradley, CityBridgeFoundation; Brian Backstrom and Thomas Carroll, Brighter ChoiceFoundation; Rebecca DiBiase, Dan Katzir, and Erica Lepping, theEli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Chester E. Finn Jr., MichaelPetrilli, and Terry Ryan, Thomas B. Fordham Institute; KellyGarrett, Rainwater Charitable Trust; Frederick M. Hess, AmericanEnterprise Institute; Paul Hill, Center on Reinventing PublicEducation; Gisèle Huff, Jaquelin Hume Foundation; Leslie Jacobs;Neeru Khosla, Amar Foundation; Alex Johnston, ConnCAN; RobinLake, National Public Charter School Research Center; Natalie LaMantia, Green Dot Public Schools; John Lock, Charter SchoolGrowth Fund; Cathy Lund, Walton Family Foundation; Bruno V.Manno, Annie E. Casey Foundation; Kenneth Merin and Carol VanAtten, Charles Hayden Foundation; Ted Mitchell, NewSchoolsVenture Fund; Chris Nelson, the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund;Jeremy Nowak, the Reinvestment Fund; Lory Pilchik, Lori Fey, andZeynep Young, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Joe and CarolReich, Beginning with Children Foundation; Brian Rogers, RogersFamily Foundation; Larry Rosenstock, High Tech High; AndrewRotherham, Education Sector; Jim Shelton, Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation; Gretchen Sims, Joyce Foundation.

Chapter I: Introduction

Many philanthropists put improving public education at the top oftheir agenda, but for many years donors have struggled to have areal impact on sub-par schools. Too often, grants to support reformin existing schools have made little difference toward improving stu-dent performance.

Enter charter schools. Independently operated and free frommany laws and regulations that constrict traditional district schools,charter schools strike many funders as one of the most effective waysto invest in public education. Nearly 18 years after the nation’s firstcharter law was passed in Minnesota, charter schooling remains oneof the nation’s most promising efforts to produce more great publicschools, especially for low-income and minority students. Fortystates and the District of Columbia now have charter school laws,and more than 4,000 schools serve over 1.4 million students—about3 percent of the nation’s public school population. Families contin-ue to clamor for more charter schools, lining up on long waiting listsfor the chance to enroll their children.

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What is a Charter School?A charter school:• is a public school funded with public money.• is tuition-free for all students.• is non-sectarian, non-religious, and may not discriminate in

student admissions.• is chosen by families.• is semi-autonomous, operating under its own charter—hence

the name—and thus exempt from many of the regulations andcollective bargaining agreements under which traditional dis-trict schools operate.

• is free to be a unique school designed to meet the needs of thestudents it intends to serve.

• is required tomeet the same graduation standards as other schools.• is responsible for improving student achievement and adhering

to its charter contract, or face closure.• receives discounted funding (in most, but not all, states), thus

making it partially reliant on philanthropic support.• can be a stand-alone school or part of a network of charter schools.• can be nonprofit or for-profit.

The Promise of Charter SchoolsThe promise of charter schools helps explain why philanthropistsfrom coast to coast continue to play a vital role in the charter sector, asthey have from the very beginning. For nearly 20 years, funders havesupported school entrepreneurs during the critical start-up years.They have helped successful charter schools replicate themselves.They have backed organizations that exist to help charter schools suc-ceed and have educated state leaders about the need to foster a char-ter-supportive policy environment. And they have helped create aneducational sector that liberates teachers and administrators from theconstraints imposed by traditional district schools, allowsmore exper-imentation and innovation in the classroom, and provides public edu-cation choices for parents and students.

Many charter schools across the country have moved to the forefrontin educational achievement, and some are producing astonishingresults with traditionally underserved groups of students. The mostsuccessful have served as models for new charter schools and, insome areas, spurred innovation in traditional district schools.

I n v e s t i n g i n C h a r t e r S c h o o l s

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Why Charter Schools?Donors across the country have backed charter schools because ofthe sector’s potential to:• Circumvent the barriers to change in traditional district schools

by starting new schools.• Create opportunities for breakthrough approaches to educating

young people.• Provide diverse schooling options, especially to parents who

cannot afford private school.• Bring more entrepreneurial leadership into education.• Foster greater accountability for results.• Introduce competitive pressures for improvement into public

education.• Empower parents and community organizations to directly

shape children’s education.• Generate models that can be used in schools everywhere.

Donor’s Perspective“Almost All of These Schools Are Charter Schools”

Nine years ago, the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation decided toinvest in helping to create better high schools, and we have madeover $2 billion in grants.…Many of the small schools that we invest-ed in did not improve students’ achievement in any significantway.… But a few of the schools that we funded achieved somethingamazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and lowresults with ones that have high expectations and high results. Theseschools are not selective in whom they admit, and they are over-whelmingly serving kids in poor areas, most of whose parents didnot go to college. Almost all of these schools are charter schools.

Bill GatesCo-chair and trustee, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

New Opportunities, New ChallengesFor all of its potential, the sector still faces many challenges. Thoughmany funders remain excited by the possibilities of chartering, theynevertheless share a number of concerns about the state of the sector.

• Quality. The quality of charter schools remains uneven. It is notuncommon to find charter schools among the very best of acity’s or state’s public schools—but also, sometimes, among theworst. And it has proven difficult for those who oversee charterschools to shut down those that are unsuccessful. Many funderswonder if they have done enough to insist on high quality in theschools they support.

• Funding. Charter schools continue to be under-funded. Almostall states deny charter schools capital funding, forcing them tospend a portion of their operating funds on facilities. And inmany states, charter schools receive less than 100 percent of theoperating funds district schools receive.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

• Access. Access to charter schools varies greatly across the country.Ten states do not even permit charter schools, and the laws ofmany other states hinder the growth of truly independent charterschools. According to the Center for Education Reform, whichpublishes a charter school laws “report card” annually, only 21states earn an “A” or a “B” for the quality of their charter laws.

• Opposition. While charter schools have gained bipartisan sup-port in many places, in others the political backlash against themhas grown along with the sector. Even where charter schools areproducing extraordinary results, they remain controversial due tothe threat they pose to established interests. Opponents seek tolimit the number of charter schools, restrict their autonomy, cuttheir funding, and place them under the authority of school dis-tricts and collective bargaining agreements.

To address these challenges and help the charter sector live up to itspotential, a broader spectrum of private donors, foundations, edu-cation entrepreneurs, businesses leaders, and policymakers musttake some new and different steps. Relying solely on the strategiesand the players of the past is simply insufficient given the challengesof the future. Too much is at stake to allow charter schools toplateau, especially at a moment when charter schools are an optionavailable to just 3 percent of public school students nationwide.

The Need for Small- and Mid-sized FundersToday more than ever, the charter sector needs an influx of small-and mid-sized funders. Smart investments, even if modest, can beleveraged to produce big results. There is a widespread feelingamong charter-sector donors that additional funders must bebrought into the charter sector. No one can quantify precisely whatit would cost to build the sector from its current size to its potentialscale, but the price-tag would surely reach into the tens—perhapseven hundreds—of billions of dollars. Current donors see this needat all levels of the sector, from national organizations needing sup-port for scaled-up efforts to individual schools just starting out.


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Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsThe great majority of foundations do not have tens or hundreds ofmillions of dollars to invest in any one program. Having a moremodest sum to direct, however, does not mean that a donor cannothave an important impact on the quality of the charter school sector.

Generally speaking, there are two main strategies for wieldinginfluence with smaller grants.

Finding strategic niches. One strategy for effectively usingsmaller grants is to precisely target charter-related initiatives—espe-cially those whose existence is significantly affected by a $10,000 to$50,000 investment. Patient, strategic donors can find opportuni-ties to make their five-figure investments reap enormous dividends.(Please see the sidebar titled, “FindingMarket Niches in the CharterSchool Sector.”) And, even without finding new programs, all of themultimillion-dollar examples given throughout this guidebook havetheir smaller-dollar counterpart at the local level.

Collaboration. The other strategy for effectively using smallergrants is to combine funds with those of other donors to create alarger pool of resources. A funder can do this independently, simplyby talking with other potential donors and developing a fund, theuses of which are left to the investors’ joint discretion. Or a fundercan contribute money to already established funds, such as thosemanaged by community foundations or those initiated by other fun-ders for the express purpose of drawing in multiple funders to sup-port charter schools.

We have added brief sidebars throughout this guidebook titled“Leveraging Smaller Investments.” In these sidebars, a variety ofdonors describe some of their very best small-scale, high-impactcharter school grants.

Perhaps more important than funds, however, is the energy, vitality,and innovation that small- and mid-sized funders can bring to thecharter sector. To encourage this new wave of smart, smaller fun-ders, this guidebook offers chapter-by-chapter advice for relativelysmall donors, as well as examples of truly consequential, sub-six-fig-ure charter-related grants.

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The charter sector remains heavily influenced by the philan-thropic community, which has played an enormous role since itsbeginning. Attentive to the promise of charter schools, in 2003 ThePhilanthropy Roundtable commissioned Jump-starting the CharterSchool Movement: A Guide for Donors. Today, given the challenge ofgrowing the charter school sector while maintaining its quality, theRoundtable has commissioned this thoroughly revised guidebook,which builds on the earlier work while drawing heavily on recentdevelopments in the charter sector and incorporating the advice ofleading charter funders.


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Expert’s PerspectiveFinding Market Niches in the Charter School Sector

Nobody has ever suggested that, having written Harry Potter andthe Sorcerer’s Stone, J. K. Rowling should have launched a publish-ing company to market the book. It was never expected thatMicrosoft would only be viable if it started manufacturing and sell-ing computers, or that Amazon.com should only be taken seriouslyif it opened a chain of brick-and-mortar stores.

Yet that all-or-nothing mindset can be found among some K-12education reformers. Dollars are primarily directed to entrepreneurswho open highly successful new schools.Most of these schools succeedby hiring top-tier personnel, extending the school day, and creatingdisciplined cultures. This “whole-school-or-nothing” approach hasfavored truly excellent practitioners who accept conventional notionsof how schools work—at the expense, however, of innovators who pio-neer new ways of addressing stubborn challenges.

As a result, relatively conventional ideas (like adding instruc-tional time) have diverted attention from radical innovations (liketechnology or specialization) that don’t necessarily lend themselvesto “whole school” reform models. It has also favored reformers whoaugment rather than reinvent school practices, leading to an under-investment in providers more likely to deliver cost-efficiencieswhich free up resources to drive improvement.

The goal is to offer donors new to the field the best ideas aboutthe most effective ways they can support a high-quality charterschool sector, both in their communities and across the country. Tothat end, this guidebook draws on the deep experience of many ofthe sector’s most active funders. It reflects their thinking about howprivate philanthropists can lift the charter school sector to a newlevel of excellence in the next 20 years. These funders have many dif-ferent ideas about the best ways to support chartering. As a result,this guide does not offer a simple recipe for all donors to follow.Instead, it offers a menu of possibilities for readers to choose from,adapt, and implement.

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This “whole-school-or-nothing” mindset furthermore slows charter-sector growth because new ventures must go through the entireenergy-sapping routine of launching a new school—even if only alimited portion of this energy actually builds on core expertise.Would Amazon.com have grown as fast, had as big an impact, orserved its customers as well if investors had expected Jeff Bezos tomimic his competitors by building a national chain of retail outlets?Amazon’s success was precisely that its technology-driven solutionwasn’t simply a “more, better” version of the familiar bookstore.

Ultimately, charter-school builders are just one key element of avibrant reform ecosystem. Specialized new providers can help pro-vide and finance facilities, recruit and train educators and schoolleaders, use technology to deliver or enhance instruction, delivertutoring, offer data systems and management, craft curricula andinstructional materials, and provide high-quality assessment andperformance analysis. In doing so, they can ease the lives of charteroperators and increase the likelihood of dramatic, replicableadvances in quality and productivity.Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studiesat the American Enterprise Institute. This sidebar is adaptedfrom “Encouraging Diverse Suppliers,” co-authored by Hess andBruno V. Manno, senior associate for education at the Annie E.Casey Foundation.

Quick Facts on the Charter Sector• In 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school law in the

United States. California followed suit in 1992.• 1,400,000 students attend 4,600 public charter schools in 40

states and the District of Columbia (as of early 2009).• 426 new public charter schools opened in the 2008-09 school

year. In 2007-08, 362 new public charter schools opened.• 26 states impose limits or caps on the number of charter

schools that may operate.• 60 percent of students in public charter schools are minorities.• 78 percent is the average per-pupil funding charter schools

receive relative to district schools.• 9 percent is the market penetration among Arizona’s charter

schools, making it the highest market share among the states.• 55 percent is the market penetration among NewOrleans’ char-

ter schools, making it the highest market share among themajor cities.

Source: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

AWord of CautionBefore considering charter-support strategies, a word of caution isin order: The charter school landscape differs vastly from state tostate. Depending on each individual state’s charter law, funding for-mulas, flexibility, and authorizers (the organizations that license andoversee charter schools) can vary widely. New funders, especiallythose working in a specific city or state, must take the time to learnabout the local landscape. They must investigate and become thor-oughly familiar with the state’s charter laws—assuming, of course,that their state even has charter laws. (Please see the sidebar titled“For National and State-by-state Charter Information.”)


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For National and State-by-state Charter InformationSeveral organizations provide information about the national char-ter school sector and links to state websites for more information.

• The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools providesresources about the state of the sector, offering state-by-statecontact information for on-the-ground, local organizations, atits website, publiccharters.org.

• The U.S. Charter Schools’ website, uscharterschools.org, pro-vides general information and links to resources for and aboutcharter schools.

• The Center for Education Reform rates state charter laws andcompiles and distributes an annual directory of charter schoolsacross the nation. Those resources are available at the Centerfor Education Reform’s website, edreform.com.

• The Charter School Growth Fund hosts a Charter MarketDatabase, designed to assist charter school operators, funders,and other members of the national charter community to betterunderstand the dynamics of different public charter schoolmarkets and to share knowledge of these dynamics with eachother. The database can be found at charterfundgrowth.org, andis updated regularly as new information is added by users andcollected by members of the fund’s team.

In addition, The Philanthropy Roundtable aims to facilitate funders’support for high-quality charter schools through conferences,publications, and specialized consulting services. To learn moreabout our work, please visit PhilanthropyRoundtable.org. Forcontact information for the projects and funders referenced in thisguidebook, please see the appendices.

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Chapter II: Five Strategic Priorities

When making grants or investments in the charter school sector,donors naturally want to be strategic. They want to focus their fund-ing on activities and organizations that can make a long-term dif-ference for the success of chartering. How can funders target theirresources to maximize their return on investment in a high-qualitycharter sector?

Taking the charter sector to the next level—in terms of both scaleand quality—will require addressing these five strategic priorities:

• Building a Robust Supply of High-quality New Schools:Since the first charter school opened in 1992, the number ofcharters nationwide has grown tremendously. But families con-tinue to demand more charter schools, with waiting lists grow-ing steadily longer and parents becoming ever more frustrated.How can donors help ensure that there are enough new charterschools—and sufficient excellence among them—to fulfill thedemand for better schooling options?

• Priming the Human Capital Pipeline: In charter schools, asin all schools, teachers and leaders are absolutely essential tostudent success. Yet charter schools face shortages of highlyeffective teachers and leaders, especially those who are pre-pared to work in their unique environments. Funders will havean important role to play over the next several years, support-ing the development of a well-primed pipeline of talentedhuman capital for charter schools and helping fund the devel-opment of innovative technologies that can decrease thedependence of the sector on finding ever more sources of talent.

• Addressing Critical Operational Challenges: Severe opera-tional challenges have made it difficult for charter schools tostart and thrive. Obtaining adequate “back office” services,financing facilities and operations, and developing sound busi-ness and accountability plans are among the most prominentdifficulties. Tackling these challenges would help more charterschools open, and help existing charter schools focus on creat-ing great learning programs.

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• Defining and Improving Quality: Charter school authorizersare the organizations that grant charters and oversee charterschools. In theory, they exert quality control in chartering,screening out unqualified charter applicants and holdingschools accountable for results. But too few authorizers areequipped to perform these roles well. Beyond authorizers, thereis minimal information available to the public about how wellcharter schools are doing. Donors can help by investing in thecollection and dissemination of data on charter schools and byestablishing clear measures and standards of quality for chartergrantees.

• Forging Charter-friendly Public Policies: Charter school pol-icy establishes the processes and conditions under which all ofa state’s charter schools must operate. Yet in too many states,charter school policies are hindering the potential effectivenessand the scale of the charter sector. In other states, good policiesare under attack by charter opponents. Charter advocates arerarely as well-organized or well-funded as those who challengethem. Public policy will remain a major factor in determiningwhether the charter school sector is able to capitalize on its suc-cesses so far and continue to grow with quality.

The bulk of this guidebook is dedicated to a close examination ofthese five strategic priorities. The guidebook describes each strate-gic priority in detail and explains how funders are addressing it—orhope to. A concluding section pulls back for a broader view, exam-ining the next phase of philanthropic support and suggesting aseries of “Big Ideas” in need of funding. The guidebook concludeswith two appendices that provide contact information for thegrantees and funders highlighted in the text.


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Chapter III: Building a Robust Supplyof High-quality New Schools

How can donors help ensure that there will be enough new charterschools—and high enough quality among them—to fulfill the greatand growing demands for better schooling options for Americanstudents? How can donors help ensure there will be enough good,new charter schools to contribute to wider changes in public educa-tion?

For the charter sector to fulfill its promise, it needs a steady sup-ply of excellent new schools. As the sector has matured, two primarysupply routes have grown up within it: opening individual newschools and replicating successful schools through charter school“brands.” Many donors have a strong bias in favor of one or anotherof these methods—investing solely in brands to help achieve scalemore rapidly, or seeding only new individual schools to help fostergreater innovation.

Ideas for New Funders• Provide start-up funds to one or more local charter founding

groups with real potential for success.• Provide funds to “brand-name” charter management organiza-

tions (CMOs) so they can open new charter schools in the com-munity.

• Provide funds to an intermediary so it can invest in—and, moreimportantly, demand results from—the most promising charterschools.

Rebecca DiBiase manages investments in school districts and char-ter schools for the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. “We invest inreplication,” she says, “because we believe it is the fastest way to scalewith quality. But we know that every good replicated school startedas an individual charter school. If they didn’t receive support, wewouldn’t have the next generation of replications.” Both methods arenecessary; neither alone is sufficient.

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Support for Individual SchoolsIndividual, “one-off ” charter schools embody the entrepreneurialspirit of the charter school sector and remain an important force inproviding innovative high-quality educational options for children.Philanthropists continue to play a vital role in aiding educationentrepreneurs’ efforts to design and start up these new schools.(Please see the sidebar titled “Supporting New Charter Schools.”)

Supporting New Charter SchoolsThe Walton Family Foundation, based in Bentonville, Arkansas,has made many contributions to the development of the charter sec-tor, but one of its most wide-reaching and best-known strategies isdirect grants for planning, starting-up, and implementing new char-ter schools. Since 1997, Walton has made approximately 400 plan-ning grants of $20,000 to help groups develop business plans fornew schools, and an additional $10,000 to help themwrite the char-ter proposals that are required by most charter school authorizers(which are the agencies that approve and oversee charter schools).

In addition, Walton has awarded approximately 750 grants of$250,000 to help schools during the start-up phase. To maximize itsimpact, the foundation targets certain states and cities, places wherecharter schools have the potential to achieve significant marketshare. To receive initial funding, schools must successfully completea rigorous screening process by providing a detailed business plan,maintaining a positive credit report, and demonstrating strongpotential for delivering excellent academic results for students.Subsequent grants are contingent on achieving these ambitious per-formance goals.

The Texas-based Challenge Foundation was established in1989 by Georgia Gulf Corporation entrepreneur John Bryan, andwas an important pioneer in charter school philanthropy. The foun-dation was enthusiastic early on, providing seed capital for 185 char-ter schools nationwide early in the sector’s history. Today, it supportsa growing number of Challenge Foundation Academies (CFAs).The foundation runs four CFAs, including a K-5 charter school inIndianapolis, a three-campus (K-5, K-8, and 6-12) charter school inthe greater Denver area, as well as two charter schools (K-5 and 6-12) in rural areas near Charlotte, North Carolina. Construction isunderway for two more CFAs, with campuses set to open nearPhoenix (in August 2009) and Asheville, North Carolina (in 2010).


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The Challenge Foundation is also looking into potential sites inBaton Rouge, St. Louis, and Deltona, Florida.

Central to its “brand” is a core knowledge component. CFAsbelieve, in the words of E. D. Hirsch Jr., professor emeritus of edu-cation and the humanities at the University of Virginia and founderof the Core Knowledge Foundation, that “for the sake of academicexcellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy, early schoolingshould provide a solid, specific, shared core curriculum in order tohelp children establish strong foundations of knowledge.”

The Beginning with Children Foundation, based in New YorkCity, operates two charter schools in Brooklyn. The first, Beginningwith Children Charter School, began as a private school and con-verted to charter status when New York state passed its charter lawin 2001. The second opened in 2000. Joe and Carol Reich estab-lished the foundation in 1989. Joe, a highly successful investmentmanager with a penchant for starting new businesses, and Carol, adevelopmental psychologist, have invested roughly $4 million in theschools since they opened, and intend to provide a high-quality edu-cation to children in Brooklyn while effecting positive change in thebroader public school system.

The Henry Ford Academy is a public charter high school inDearborn, Michigan, that was created in 1997 by the Ford MotorCompany Fund and the Henry Ford Museum. Located on thecampus of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, the HenryFord Academy is the nation’s first charter school developed jointlyby a major multinational corporation and a nonprofit cultural insti-tution, working in partnership with the local school district. FordMotor Company Fund provided $6 million between 1996 and 2000to support development of the school’s facility and core curriculum.In exchange for its investment, the fund saw nearly 90 percent of theacademy’s graduates go on to post-secondary education, a figurethat is much better than usual, given the school’s demographics.

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B u i l d i n g a R o b u s t S u p p l y o f H i g h - q u a l i t y N ew S c h o o l s

Funders point out that all of the sector’s highly successful networksof schools began their life as a single school, and the future successof the charter school sector will depend in large measure on the con-tinued innovation in individual new schools. (Please see sidebartitled “Donor’s Perspective: Planning and Start-up Grants for NewCharter Schools.”)

Donor’s PerspectivePlanning and Start-up Grants for New Charter Schools

Donors of all sizes can make meaningful contributions to publiccharter schools. While the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) makessignificant grants to groups driving school replication and policyreform on a national scale, its “bread and butter” giving strategy since1998 has been to make planning and start-up grants. These grantsare directed to qualified entities in local communities, helping themplan and build individual high-quality public charter schools.

Small donors are especially important to the success of the char-ter school sector. A grant of even $10,000 can go a long way towardhelping a local public charter school start an instrumental musicprogram or pay for a portion of curriculum development. Likewise,$10,000 can help a high-performing charter management organiza-tion (CMO) create 10 more seats at high-quality schools, or help astatewide charter school association launch technical assistance andadvocacy programs which serve an entire state’s population of char-ter schools.

Low-income FocusThe Walton Family Foundation makes grants to qualified charterschools that serve primarily low-income families who typically donot have the resources to select private or high-performing districtschools for their children. Foundation grants help new schools gainnecessary resources to open successfully. New charter schools havesignificant and expensive needs, from planning to board develop-ment, teacher recruitment and preparation, and acquisition ofschool furniture, fixtures, and supplies. WFF invests in both charterschool replications (organizations that grew from a single, high-per-forming school to a management organization that oversees a num-ber of charter schools) and individual public charter schools.

Planning and Start-up Grants to Public Charter SchoolsMaking strategic grants to school-founding groups—typically localeducators, community organizations, and nonprofits—can producestrong results. Over the past decade, WFF has made 750 grants toindividual public charter schools. Two-thirds of these schools arestand-alone charter schools. WFF invests in qualified new publiccharter schools in 38 of the largest urban school districts in the


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country, with grants up to $20,000 for qualified planning groupsand grants up to $250,000 for qualified new public charter schools.Charter schools in every community can be supported with a simi-lar strategy to help them with planning and start-up costs.

The overarching goal of our charter school grantmaking is toinvest in schools that improve student achievement in reading, lan-guage arts, and math, as measured by valid and reliable standard-ized tests. Schools must develop specific metrics and set annual tar-gets for academic student performance, systems for measuringprogress against those targets, and strategies for refining instructionto achieve those outcomes. When it considers applications, WFFlooks for evidence of strong governance, curricula and assessmentplanning, and teacher compensation.

WFF makes nearly all of its individual charter school grantsthrough grant committees: teams of education, business, founda-tion, and legal experts convened in many states, with the help ofindividual statewide charter school associations. When there is nocommittee, it interviews school applicants directly after consideringthe strength of applications received on our website.

Investments in a Single School CanHelp Create Lasting SuccessMaking an investment in the start-up of a viable stand-alone char-ter school can result in significant success. For example, in the fall of2000, WFF visited the Academy of Math and Science (AMS) inTucson, Arizona, after researching new school openings in the area.At the time, the small, sixth through eighth grade program served 27students (75 percent of whom were low-income) and was housed inan old strip mall. While the school struggled with low enrollmentand high start-up costs, the school’s founder was an impressiveleader. She presented an education program based on CoreKnowledge standards and a comprehensive set of standards used inschools where the founder had taught in Europe for 10 years. Withstrong training and advanced degrees in education, the foundershad created a clear and rigorous curriculum and were determined todemonstrate that all students can learn to high standards.

WFF made an initial grant of $150,000 to AMS in 2000 and,after reviewing academic and fiscal performance, a subsequentgrant of $67,100 in 2003. Today, the Academy serves 273 K-12 stu-dents and is one of the highest-performing public schools in Tucson.

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In 2008, it won the U.S. Department of Education’s No Child LeftBehind “Blue Ribbon Award” and is accredited by the AmericanAcademy for Liberal Education. To this day, the founder remains theschool’s director.

Supporting an individual charter school or an entity that assistsmany charter schools can make a significant and lasting impact onstudents, their local communities, and the broader charter schoolsector. We’ve also learned at WFF that an investment in a singlecharter school’s start-up can bring rich results to future generationsof students.

Cathy LundSenior program officer, Walton Family Foundation

While individual schools are critical to continued growth and inno-vation in the charter sector, it has become clear that to reach thescale—necessary both to meet demand and to impact public educa-tion more broadly—the sector cannot rely solely on individual,stand-alone schools.

Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsGetting Stand-alones to Stand Together

The Rogers Family Foundation invests $75,000 per year in theOakland Charter School Collaborative. There are 33 charter schoolsin the Oakland Unified School District, but many of them are inde-pendently run. They’re focused on their work, and aren’t necessarilyworking together on issues of common concern. Through a grant totheCalifornia Charter Schools Association, we were able to hire anexecutive director who in turn helped create the Oakland CharterSchool Collaborative. Under the auspices of this collaborative, whichhas about 25 of the charters participating, we have been able to starta charter athletic league, apply and receive funds for emergency pre-paredness training, share best practices, develop relationships withthe district around financial and facility issues, and represent charterschools during ongoing discussions about a new city parcel tax.

Brian RogersExecutive director, Rogers Family Foundation


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Some funders also argue that, as a group, stand-alone schools areunlikely to produce the consistent quality needed to power a vibrantcharter sector. In the effort to “scale with quality,” several fundershave invested in organizations that fall generally into two categories:

• Brands: organizations that seek to start multiple quality newschools with readily identifiable common features; and

• Intermediaries: organizations that aim to help multiply newhigh-quality schools, not necessarily linked under a common“brand.”

Investments in BrandsMost strong industries have one or more compelling “brands.”Consumers come to know a brand and what it signifies—certaincharacteristics, a given standard of quality. Brands have proven veryuseful in the marketplace. Not onlydo brands signal valuable informa-tion to consumers, but they alsocreate powerful incentives for theirowners to maintain quality to keepthe brand-name strong. Perhapsmost importantly, brands canachieve economies of scale thatmake them more efficient thanstand-alone shops. For these rea-sons—and based on the success of a handful of individual charterschools—the nation has seen the rise of a significant number ofcharter school brands over the past several years.

Several of these schools are organized together under the umbrellaof nonprofit “charter management organizations” (CMOs). Thesebrands are tightly organized. Their schools closely resemble eachother. They exert powerful quality control. And, from curriculumdevelopment to teacher recruitment, from facilities services to pro-fessional development, CMOs operate many services centrally inorder to cut out reduplication and achieve cost-savings. (For moreinformation about charter school brands, please see the sidebartitled “Brands: Supporting Networks of New Schools.”)

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Charter Management

Organizations (CMOs) are

the “brands” of the charter

sector, with quality control

and cost efficiencies.

CMOs vs. EMOsThere is a crucial difference between charter management organiza-tions (CMOs) and education management organizations (EMOs).

CMOs are nonprofit charter school networks, while EMOs arefor-profit charter school networks.

While this guidebook is principally concerned with CMOs, it isimportant to note that many education reformers believe thatEMOs hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. Ifinvestors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achieve-ment and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have dis-covered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schoolsspecifically and public education generally.

One national brand that has received support from many funders isthe Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). All KIPP schools sub-scribe to a set of principles called the “five pillars.” Their leadersundergo a common training program. And KIPP “national” providesindividual schools with continuing support, while monitoringwhether schools are implementing the five pillars faithfully. Buteach school operates independently or as part of a regional CMO,like those that have formed in Houston and Washington, D.C.

By autumn 2008, 66 KIPP schools were operating in 19 statesand Washington, D.C., serving over 17,000 students. KIPP is in themiddle of an ambitious growth plan, with a goal of operating 100schools—serving 25,000 students nationwide—by autumn 2010.More impressive than the scale, however, is KIPP’s continued abilityto demonstrate superior student performance. To take one tellingstatistic: KIPP’s collegematriculation rate is 80 percent, as comparedto 20 percent for district public schools with similar demographics.

Achievement First is a CMO that operates a growing networkof charter schools in Connecticut and New York. Achievement Firstwas founded in 2003 by the leaders of Amistad Academy, a nation-ally acclaimed charter school in New Haven, Connecticut. InConnecticut, Achievement First currently runs five academies (twoelementary, two middle, and one high school) under two charters inNew Haven; one middle academy in Bridgeport; and two academies(one elementary and onemiddle) under a single charter in Hartford.

In Brooklyn, Achievement First runs seven academies (four ele-mentary and three middle) under five charters. (Notably, under theleadership of Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City


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Department of Education, the political climate in New York hasbeen very receptive to charter schools—making replication efforts inBrooklyn easier than in New Haven, where the original school waslocated.) Altogether, the Achievement First network serves some2,500 students in grades K-12.

There are many opportunities for funders who want to see strongbrands of schools proliferate. Donors can help by providing funds forsuccessful single-site schools to grow to scale. For example, theUNOCharter School Network opened its first charter school in 1998.Today, UNO manages eight charter schools in Chicago and one inNew Orleans, making it one of the nation’s largest Hispanic-basedcharter managers. Also in Chicago,Noble Street Charter School’sfirst campus, now called NobleStreet College Prep, opened in1999. Since then, Noble Street hasadded seven campuses—with plansto open two more in 2009 and onemore in 2010. In California,AspirePublic Schools opened its doors in1999; by the 2007-08 school year,Aspire was serving a total of over6,000 K-12 students at 21 locations throughout the state, with plansto open three to four new schools each year. In Philadelphia,MasteryCharter Schools opened in September 2001, and has since expand-ed to four schools. The examples go on, but the point remains thesame. Well-designed stand-alone charter schools can, with strategicinvestment, be replicated and their outstanding results delivered tomore and more students.

Donors can also contribute to the growing number of existingnetworks by providing support to bring one school from a networkto a specific community, or helping a community-based CMO growto scale. For example, a network of major donors contributed to anexpansion campaign to replicate additional KIPP and YES PrepPublic Schools in Houston. Led by the Michael & Susan DellFoundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, HoustonEndowment Inc., the Charter School Growth Fund, Jeff andWendyHines, and John and Laura Arnold, these donors hope to grow KIPPand YES Prep to 55 Houston schools serving 30,000 pre-K-12 stu-dents within the next 10 years.

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Well-designed stand-alone

charter schools can be

replicated and their

outstanding results delivered

to more and more students.

Similarly, as part of its $8 million Early Years Initiative, theCityBridge Foundation of Washington, D.C., has supported KIPPandDCPreparatory Academy with approximately $3.5 million overfive years. The investment aims to create excellence in early childhoodschooling throughout the nation’s capital. David Bradley, co-founderof CityBridge, built the Advisory Board Company and CorporateExecutive Board, twoWashington-based consulting companies, and isthe owner of the AtlanticMedia Company, publisher of several promi-nent journals, including The Atlantic, National Journal, Hotline, and

Government Executive. KatherineBradley, co-founder and presidentof CityBridge, believes that charterschools offer the best vehicle for theearly childhood initiative. “Wedecided to do our work throughcharter schools,” she says, “becausethe charter space is where we foundpartners—the charter management

organizations—that have the capacity to run more than one school,and to grow a great idea to scale.”

As the charter sector has matured and experienced the rise ofcharter brands, funders have increasingly realized the importance ofCMOs’ internal capacity to replicate schools successfully. Donorscan also support replication of proven charter models by investingdirectly in the CMOs that support the network of schools. Severalfunders—including the NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools),the Tiger Foundation, the Charter School Growth Fund, and theBroad Foundation—have directly supported the “home offices” ofCMOs by providing grants that enable them to build their organiza-tions by employing senior staff members, hiring outside experts tohelp with finance, human resources, business planning, and systemsmanagement for data and assessment. Numerous others, includingthe venture philanthropy funds discussed in the next section, haveprovided general operating support, as well as business and strate-gic planning assistance, to several CMOs to develop their internalcapacity to undertake replication efforts.


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Funders have increasingly

realized the importance of

CMOs’ internal capacity to

replicate schools successfully.

Contributions to IntermediariesIn addition to directly supporting brands and their schools, donorshave also invested in what may be called charter growth “intermedi-aries.” These organizations provide funding and services to supportthe growth of high-quality charter schools. In other words, they con-tribute to scale not by creating more schools of their own, but byproviding assistance so that many schools or groups can successful-ly expand their models. Intermediaries are of increasing interest tomany donors, since intermediariesprovide donors with a staff of full-time specialists who conduct duediligence, provide expert guidance,and hold grantees accountable.

Two “venture philanthropyfunds,” the NewSchools VentureFund and the Charter SchoolGrowth Fund (CSGF), funnel a sig-nificant number of philanthropicdollars to new and existing net-works of charter schools. Bothwork specifically to develop and support promising networks ofhigh-quality charter schools, and apply a rigorous due-diligenceprocess as they select would-be CMOs. Promising candidates receiveintensive early-stage support—both financial and strategic planningassistance—and those that make good progress are eligible for larg-er and larger grants. As CMOs operate more and more schools,NewSchools and CSGF expect that public revenues will replace pri-vate philanthropy. But their initial capital aims to make it possiblefor CMOs to invest in quality and scale from the outset.“Nevertheless,” says NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell, “we think of ourvalue proposition as not only aggregating funds and providing dili-gence services, but also as providing first-class management assis-tance to the CMOs themselves.”

Other intermediaries focus on a specific geographic area. Inevery state with a charter law, at least one organization has formedto help people in the state start charter schools. While some of theseonly offer limited support, some have become real “incubators” fornew schools, becoming deeply involved with school start-up. NewSchools for New Orleans (NSNO), for example, started in NewOrleans after Hurricane Katrina. (Please see Chapter VIII: “BigHopes for the Big Easy.”)

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Donors have also invested

in charter-growth

“intermediaries,” which

provide funding and services

to grow the number of

high-quality charter schools.

Brands: Supporting Networks of New SchoolsTwo venture philanthropy funds, the NewSchools Venture Fund andthe Charter School Growth Fund, funnel a significant number ofphilanthropic dollars to new and existing networks of charterschools.

Since its founding in 1998, NewSchools has focused on identify-ing and investing in proven educational ventures to accelerate theirgrowth and development. “Like venture capital funds,” saysNewSchools’ CEO Ted Mitchell, “we take board seats and becomeactive investors, working with the entrepreneurs we support to buildsustainable world-class organizations.” With support from theRobertson Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton FamilyFoundation, and others, NewSchools has made grants to more than30 school support organizations, human capital providers, andCMOs. Its CMO grantees include:

• Achievement First• Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools• Aspire Public Schools• DC Preparatory Academy• Education for Change• Friendship Public Charter Schools• Green Dot Public Schools• High Tech High• Inner City Educational Foundation• KIPP DC• Leadership Public Schools• Lighthouse Academies• Mastery Charter Schools• Noble Network of Charter Schools• Partnerships to Uplift Communities• Perspectives Charter Schools• Uncommon Schools


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The Charter School Growth Fund was founded in 2005 to supportthe development and expansion of charter school management andsupport organizations. Unlike NewSchools, CSGF uses an openadmissions process to identify charter management and supportorganizations that show great potential, but may not ordinarilyreceive the attention of large funders. With committed capital ofmore than $150 million, CSGF expects to create 100,000 new, per-manent seats for underserved families in high-quality charterschools by 2015. The CSGF’s CMO grantees include:

• Aspire Public Schools• Bright Star Schools• Center City Public Charter Schools• Cesar Chavez School Network• Chicago International Charter School• DC Preparatory Academy• Great Hearts Academies• IDEA Public Schools• KIPP: Austin, DC, Delta (Arkansas), North Carolina, Team

(Newark)• LEARN Charter School• Mastery Learning Institute• New City Public Schools• Noble Network of Schools• Rocketship Education• Uncommon Schools, Inc.• YES Prep Public Schools

NewSchools and CSGF are donors in their own right, but they areeach fueled by contributions from philanthropists. The GatesFoundation is the largest funder of NewSchools’ CMO work.Another major supporter of NewSchools (and of CSGF as well) isthe Broad Foundation.

CSGF has received total commitments of more than $150 mil-lion from, among others, the Lynde and Harry BradleyFoundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Daniels Fund,the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, the Ewing Marion KauffmanFoundation, the Kern Family Foundation, and the Walton FamilyFoundation.

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Through its incubation program, NSNO recruits and selects educa-tion entrepreneurs to launch new, or replicate excellent, schools inNew Orleans, and provides extensive financial and operational sup-port to help them prepare for opening day. NSNO provides $10,000per month for 10 months to founding leaders, as well as significanttechnical and networking assistance. The goal of the program is toensure that new charter schools begin the academic year with well-planned academic programs and competent operational infrastruc-ture in place.

By contributing to organizations that are building brands orenabling many schools to open, funders can boost the future supplyof high-quality new schools. Once these new schools are opened,however, they will face the same challenges that faced the first 4,000charter schools. Those challenges—including personnel, facilities,quality assurance, and policy—are addressed in subsequent chapters.


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Chapter IV:Priming the Human Capital Pipeline

Whether a school is part of a network or a stand-alone charter, theschool’s teachers and leadership are critical to its success. Yet likemany traditional district schools, charter schools face shortages ofhighly effective teachers and leaders, especially those who are pre-pared to work in their unique environments. “The problem issevere,” explains Chester E. FinnJr., president of the Thomas B.Fordham Institute. “There is adire shortage of quality people,and quality human capital devel-opment programs, and job clear-inghouses, and advanced profes-sional development opportunities,and career paths in the chartersector, especially in certain regionsof the country (like the Midwest).”

Gretchen Crosby Sims, direc-tor of strategic initiatives at theChicago-based Joyce Foundation,agrees. She notes that “charterschools certainly face several dis-advantages—in terms of fundingand access to facilities, for exam-ple—but they also have the great advantage of flexibility to structuretheir working conditions and support systems for teachers and lead-ers. As funders, we should focus our work increasingly on encourag-ing the best human capital providers in education to do more oftheir work in the charter sector. We can also push the charter sectorto more fully exploit its autonomies to make schools more attractiveto high-caliber teachers and leaders.” Several national initiatives areunderway to help recruit, train, and support great leaders and teach-ers for the next generation of charter schools.

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There is a dire shortage of

quality people, and quality

human capital development

programs, and job clearing-

houses, and advanced

professional development

opportunities, and career

paths in the charter sector,

especially in certain regions of

the country (like the Midwest).

Ideas for New Funders• Pay for a prospective leader of a local charter school to receive

training in a national leadership development program.• Work with a top-tier teacher training program to bring out-

standing talent to local charter school classrooms.• Sponsor a mid-career professional who wants to participate in

a residency program with a highly successful charter manage-ment organization.

New School LeadersSeveral programs have developed on the local and national levels toaddress the growing shortage of talented school leaders. NewLeaders for New Schools (NLNS), for example, is a national non-profit organization that works to attract, prepare, and support a newgeneration of outstanding principals. The program combines anintensive summer-training institute focused on management andinstructional leadership strategies with a year-long, full-time resi-dency program (patterned after the medical school residency)alongside a successful district or charter school leader. By the end of2009, New Leaders will have partnered with districts in New YorkCity, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Memphis, Tennessee; Oakland,California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Milwaukee, Wisconsin;Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Prince George’s County,Maryland; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jefferson Parish,Louisiana. Though New Leaders prepares principals for all kinds ofurban schools, charter school leadership has always been an impor-tant focus of the program. Indeed, while New Leaders principalsserve in both charter and traditional district schools, their leaderswith the most dramatic student achievement gains are dispropor-tionately located in the charter sector. Many philanthropic organi-zations, including the Broad Foundation, have contributed to NewLeaders and some, including the Joyce Foundation, have directedthat some of their dollars specifically go to support charter schoolleadership.


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Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsConvening Charter School Leaders

One of the Rainwater Charitable Trust’s very best small grantswent to convene a cross-sector group of leadership-training pro-grams for principals who want to work in and lead public charterschools. These training programs are committed to improving stu-dent achievement for all students. To do that, they are changing theway principals are trained. While principal training is traditionallyconducted by universities through master’s degree programs in edu-cational leadership, these programs—which include universities,urban school districts, and nonprofit providers (including a CMO)—are committed to transforming the profession of school leadershipthrough rigorous selection, intensive training, and ongoing supportof school leaders. For a cost of just under $50,000, the October2008 convening allowed these thought leaders to learn from oneanother by comparing successes and challenges and to advance theircollective work. We have since hosted a second convening, as thegroup insisted on gathering again to continue the sharing andto disseminate their learnings to other groups that may want todevelop principal training programs, but which may not have thefinancial ability to experiment. Group members are now committedto making sure that school leadership remains a critical topic in thenational dialogue about education reform.

Kelly GarrettAssociate director, Rainwater Charitable Trust

Another is the Building Excellent Schools (BES) Fellowship.With the support of the Hyde Family Foundations, the DanielsFund, and the Walton Family Foundation, this year-long leader-training fellowship specifically targets individuals who want to startnew charter schools. It provides an intensive two-month institute,assistance in navigating the charter application process, residency ata charter school, and assistance in implementing the charter (orreceiving placement at an existing charter school). In 2007, BES hadtrained new leaders to serve in 23 charter schools across the country.

Many in the charter sector are deeply interested in finding andcultivating school leaders and charter managers from minoritybackgrounds. To that end, in 2008 the Charter School Growth Fundcreated and incubated Partners for Developing Futures, the goalof which is to dramatically increase the number of high-quality

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P r i m i n g t h e H um a n C a p i t a l P i p e l i n e

charter schools led by people of color. The program is a social ven-ture fund that invests in high-potential charter schools and charterschool networks that were founded (or are overseen) by a minorityleader and that serve students from minority and low-income back-grounds. “We see a great need for more recognition and support forleaders of color who show great potential in the charter sector,” saysHoward Fuller, board chair for the Black Alliance for EducationalOptions (BAEO) and a member of Partners’ advisory board.“Partners serves the important dual mission of helping to promoteminority leadership while creating additional quality public educa-tion options for underserved students.” The program works to iden-tify, recruit, and support leaders of color by providing capital andstrategic support early in their development.

TheMind Trust is a nonprofit organization based in Indianapoliswhose mission is to attract, support, and empower the nation’s mosteffective and promising education entrepreneurs. It brings these ambi-

tious reformers to Indianapolis,which has historically had difficultyattracting talent, and encouragesthem to incubate ideas and engage inventure philanthropy. Through itsEducation Entrepreneur Fellowship,the Mind Trust provides fellows withtwo years of full-time pay, seed fund-ing, and community partnerships tohelp them, and those that serve the

charter sector, launch new education initiatives. The Indianapolis-based Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Inc. provided over$830,000 in critical start-up funding for the Mind Trust, as well as anadditional $1.5 million for core operational expenses through 2010.

“The foundation frequently provides infrastructure supportbecause so many other funders often prefer to fund programs, espe-cially new programs,” explains Betsy Bikoff, chief grantmaking officerat the Fairbanks Foundation. “Oftentimes, the hardest funds to raiseare for general operating expenses.When foundations help cover thosecosts, it provides the organization with the stability to leverage supportfrom other donors.” What makes the investment so unique is thatFairbanks is not an education funder, per se. Rather, it focuses onhealth, sustainable employment, and the economic vitality ofIndianapolis—and sees charter schools and education reform asimportant components of its grantmaking.


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There is a great need for

more recognition and support

for leaders of color who

show great potential in the

charter sector.

TheKIPP Fisher Fellowship provides training for outstandingeducators to lead a charter school within the KIPP network. KIPPcovers the roughly $200,000 price-tag for training each FisherFellow (including recruitment, selection, staffing, and salary). Withsupport from the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, the BroadFoundation, and others, the year-long training program offers a res-idency period in high-performingKIPP schools, as well as intensivecoursework at New YorkUniversity’s Steinhardt School ofCulture, Education, and HumanDevelopment. Through a rigorousevaluation process, KIPP selectsless than 7 percent of applicants toparticipate in the fellowship—all ofwhom already have several years ofteaching experience, with demon-strated results among low-income students. Since 2000, KIPP hastrained over 60 principals who have gone on to open new KIPPschools in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

The Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP)offers principal training at Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones GraduateSchool of Management. Uniquely among school leadership trainingprograms, REEP’s new model occurs entirely within a businessschool, rather than at a traditional school of education. The two-year, MBA-granting, principal-training program began in July2008. During their course of study, participants are expected towork in Houston’s public schools by day, taking courses at night andon weekends. REEP offers an intensive educational entrepreneur-ship curriculum in order for school leaders to envision, build, andeffectively lead positive, achievement-oriented education environ-ments. Working in collaboration withHouston A+ Challenge, YESPrep Public Schools, Teach For America (TFA), and KIPP, REEPintends to provide Houston with the school leadership it needs as itattempts to ramp up its charter sector.

A similar programwas launched in Chicago in 2008, with aspir-ing school leaders studying at a top-tier business school in order tolearn the skills and habits of effective entrepreneurship. TheExecution in Entrepreneurial Schools Leadership (ExSL)Program is a partnership between the Kellogg School of

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The KIPP Fisher Fellowship

provides training for

outstanding educators to

lead a charter school within

the KIPP network, covering

the roughly $200,000

price-tag for each new fellow.

Management at Northwestern University and the Inner-CityTeaching Corps (ICTC). ICTC is a Chicago-based nonprofit thatoffers an array of educational programs for urban youths and fami-lies, including the Volunteer Teaching Corps (a two-year teachingprogram for recent college graduates in inner-city Chicago class-rooms), UNITE (a teacher-training program for mid-career profes-sionals), and the Alain Locke Charter Academy (recognized by theDepartment of Education as one of seven schools in the nation mosteffective at closing the achievement gap). The brainchild of ICTCfounder Patrick G. Ryan Jr.—a former Chicago public school teacherwho went on to create Incisent Technologies, the fourth fastest-growing software company in the United States—ExSL intends toprovide school leaders with the necessary skills to successfully exe-cute their vision in start-up charter schools.

Outstanding TeachersSeveral organizations have entered the charter field or expandedtheir mission to help build the pipeline of teachers and ensure thatthey are prepared to be effective in charter schools. Teach ForAmerica (TFA), a national corps of recent college graduates and pro-fessionals who commit to teaching for two years in urban and ruralpublic schools, has moved increasingly into the charter realm in thepast several years, thanks largely to philanthropic support from theFisher Fund. TFA’s work in New Orleans is one recent example.Though the organization sponsored corps members in New Orleans

before Hurricane Katrina, after thestorm it increased its recruitmentefforts with support from manydonors, including the BroadFoundation and the Greater NewOrleans Foundation. There is anurgent need for talented new teach-ers in New Orleans publicschools—most of which are charterschools. These funders have alsosupported TeachNOLA, a coopera-tive effort by The New Teacher

Project (TNTP), New Schools for New Orleans, and the stateRecovery School District to recruit, train, and certify teachers inNew Orleans Public Schools. (Please see Chapter VIII: “Big Hopesfor the Big Easy.”)


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A problem facing American

public education generally—

and the charter sector

specifically—is retaining

top-tier talent in challenging

academic environments.

The New Teacher Project has also increased its charter schoolinvolvement in recent years. TNTP’s main focus is to assist urbanschool districts across the country with growing the number of tal-ented public school teachers and creating environments for them tosucceed. TNTP has also partnered with several CMOs in Californiato help them recruit teachers. As a result, in the coming years TNTPplans to expand its placements in the charter sector through itsregional hiring center model.

Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsTurning ESL Parents into Tutors

A small-scale, high-impact charter-sector grant that we’re particular-ly proud of is our investment in the Home Language Program atLighthouse Community Charter School. For about $50,000 peryear, we are able to help fund this bilingual after-school program andengage some of the school’s parents as tutors. Crucially, the tutorsteach in the language spoken in the students’ homes, in order to helpthem better understand the content that is taught to them in Englishthroughout the regular school day. Because Lighthouse serves a pop-ulation that includes about 80 percent English language learners, wefound that the students needed a program that would help themunderstand classroom content in their native language. It has workedvery well for our students, not only in strengthening their contentknowledge, but also in strengthening their mastery of their nativelanguage. The program has become a model for other schools in thedistrict, and has helped some of the Lighthouse parents get jobs andbegin the process of becoming teachers themselves.

Brian RogersExecutive director, Rogers Family Foundation

A problem facing American public education generally—and thecharter sector specifically—is retaining top-tier talent in challengingacademic environments. As many as 70 percent of teachers in low-income communities leave within five years of entering the profes-sion, with effective educators frequently being among the first to go.Research indicates that working conditions are the primary driverin a teacher’s decision to stay at or leave a school; the demandingwork conditions at low-income schools wear down even the mostcommitted teachers. One group working to address the problem isResources for Indispensable Schools and Educators (RISE).RISE provides professional support to teachers in its network—now

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consisting of over 60 partner schools in San Francisco, Los Angeles,New York, and Chicago—including job placement into other high-needs schools with better work conditions. RISE believes thatimproved retention of effective teachers, combined with improvedrecruitment of effective teachers, will yield a dramatic increase instudent learning at RISE partner schools.

Several charter school networks have also started up their owngraduate schools of education to prepare new teachers to work incharter schools. These charter-focused programs employ a training

model that focuses heavily on class-room experience, requiring candi-dates to work in local charterschools while earning their degrees.And they help meet a need thatmany charter networks have notfound in nearby traditional teacherpreparation programs—rigoroustraining that focuses entirely ondemonstrable improvements instudent academic performance.With support from Larry and Amy

Robbins and the Robin Hood Foundation, for example, a group ofCMOs in New York—including KIPP, Achievement First, andUncommon Schools—are working together with Hunter College inNew York City to design a new masters’ program for teacher prepara-tion.With $10million from the Robbins family and an additional $20million from Robin Hood, the school will have funds to help cover thefirst 10 years of the program. The two-year course of study will includeclasses delivered by teachers and leaders from the partners’ charterschools, as well as Hunter professors, following an approach basedlargely on the combined best practices in Achievement First, KIPP,and Uncommon Schools. Unlike more traditional programs, TeacherU links the teaching degree to actual student achievement. All candi-dates must demonstrate real value-added gains in the classroombefore receiving their degrees. The partnership uses Hunter’s existinglicense from the state to certify teachers, the first 40 of which begantraining in July 2007.

Another charter school network, High Tech High, has taken thisidea a step further, opening its own state-approved graduate school ofeducation in September 2007 in San Diego, California. “Californianeeds an estimated 3,300 new math and science teachers each year,”


44

Teacher U links the teaching

degree to actual student

achievement. All candidates

must demonstrate value-added

gains in the classroom before

receiving their degrees.

points out Larry Rosenstock, founder and CEO of High Tech High.“The massive University of California system credentials 210 newmath and science teacher per year. By the spring of 2009, the HighTech High Graduate School of Education will have credentialed 37new math and science teachers, and by the Spring of 2010, will havecredentialed 56 new math and sci-ence teachers.” The program offersa master’s degree in education withtwo concentrations: school leader-ship, for individuals who wish tolead a small innovative school, andteacher leadership, for experiencedteachers who want to deepen theirpractice and broaden their leader-ship capacity. Tuition is subsidizedfor graduate students, who learn and work alongside teachers andadministrators in the High Tech High network of schools. Just over$3 million in initial support for development of the program wasprovided by the Amar Foundation, the Ronald Simon FamilyFoundation, and the James Irvine Foundation.

Similarly, the Fisher Fund has invested in an alternative certifi-cation program at Alliant International University in California.California law allows teacher candidates to “challenge” traditionalteacher preparation course work by passing the TeachingFoundations Exam (TFE), and then successfully completing a class-room teaching-performance assessment. Although the fast-tracktest was passed in 2001, only one university has implemented theprogram—Alliant International University, which has created theEarly Completion Option (ECO) Program. The Fisher Fund pro-vided crucial funding for its design and implementation. “Too fewschools of education are willing to think outside the box,” saysChristopher Nelson, managing director of the fund. “We found onein California: Alliant University. Alliant is very willing to serve thecharter sector—and think creatively.” Alliant’s ECO Program enablesqualified candidates (i.e., those who have passed the TFE) to enterthe classroom as paid teachers, bypassing most of the traditionallyrequired education coursework. They benefit from an intensive men-toring support system—and receive a credential within nine months.

TheHarmony Schools in Texas have likewise worked creativelyto undertake innovative practices that address the quality of theirteaching force, particularly in math and science. The 22 charter

45


Several charter networks have

also started up their own

graduate schools of education

to prepare new teachers to

work in charter schools.

schools in the Harmony network embrace a college-preparatoryfocus with a strong emphasis on mathematics, science, and comput-er applications. With support from the Cosmos Foundation, Inc.,Harmony bypasses the challenge of finding exceptionally well-qual-ified teachers—those with deep content knowledge in math and sci-ence—by recruiting talented instructors from overseas, helpingthem secure work papers, and bringing them to Texas to work inHarmony’s charter school network.

Expert’s PerspectiveNeeded: School Models for Mere Mortals

There is a major blind spot in most discussions of human capital forthe charter school sector. Yes, we need lots more great teachers inorder to keep charter networks like KIPP growing. But that’s partlybecause KIPP’s model requires superstar teachers willing to work 80hours per week—a scarce commodity. What we also need to invest inare school models that work with mere mortals. Then the teacherpipeline challenge wouldn’t be so tough.

Michael J. PetrilliVice president for national programs and policy,

Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Other Human Capital NeedsAs the charter sector has matured and seen a significant increase inthe number of charter management organizations, funders haveincreasingly realized the importance of CMOs’ internal capacity toreplicate their own schools successfully. Many teachers and formerschool leaders move up to serve in leadership positions in nationaland regional CMO “home offices,” but as the sector grows it hasbecome more difficult to fill these leadership positions with skilledcandidates. “We hear repeatedly that the deepest human capitalneeds in the charter sector extend beyond teachers and leaders, andinto the world of operations—particularly for CMOs,” says Jim Blew,director of K-12 education reform for the Walton FamilyFoundation. “We see a great need for more talent at this level.”Several foundations are working to support, develop, and foster newand talented leaders within this top tier of the human capitalpipeline.

For example, the Broad Foundation sponsors the BroadResidency in Urban Education. The Broad Residency is a man-agement development program that places talented early career


46

executives from the private and civic sectors into two-year, full-time,paid positions at the top levels of urban school systems across thecountry. Broad Residents, who have top business, public policy, andlaw school degrees, work to improve management practices of urbaneducation systems so that critical resources can be pushed down tothe classroom. During their two-year residency, participants receiveintensive professional development and access to a nationwide net-work of education leaders. Current and former Broad Residentstoday work in 29 urban school systems nationwide—and 9 out of 10graduates remain in urban education.

Through its Leadership Engagement Program, the CharterSchool Growth Fund also works to develop and network “C-level”managers (e.g., CEO, COO, CFO) inCMOs and business professionalswho are interested in CMO workand could become future boardmembers or C-level hires. TheCSGF sponsors regular meetingsfor these professionals to networkand attend educational programs,as well as a planned national gath-ering annually. While different inapproach, NewSchools VentureFund has incubated a new searchfirm, Connect the Dots, likewise aimed at this niche. Connect theDots has successfully completed a half-dozen searches nationwide.

With support from theMichael & SusanDell Foundation, the BroadFoundation and others, Education Pioneers operates a summer fellow-ship program for graduate students who wish to pursue leadership posi-tions in education. Fellows have trained through several CMOs, includ-ing Green Dot Public Schools, Victory Schools, Achievement First,Aspire Public Schools, KIPP, and Uncommon Schools.

There is an additional human capital need that, while beingaddressed at the local level, will require additional support to reachthe necessary scale nationally. Several organizations focus specifical-ly on recruiting and training charter school staff positions, but veryfew offer specialized recruitment and training for charter schoolboard members. (Please see Chapter V: “Board Development.”)These are crucial leadership roles, and the charter sector shouldsupport a large—perhaps national—effort to find and cultivate first-rate board members.

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We hear repeatedly that

the deepest human capital

needs in the charter sector

extend beyond teachers and

leaders, and into the world

of operations.

New Thinking about Labor-Management RelationsSince the beginning of the charter school movement, teachers’unions and charter advocates have found little common ground.Many observers have characterized charter schools as a direct threatto unions, because most charters do not collectively bargain withtheir teachers. Teachers’ unions have worked to block or repeal char-ter laws, or to limit the number and growth of charter schools. Somefunders believe that there is no place for teachers’ unions in charterschools—that they have the potential to limit the freedoms that arethe essence of the charter ideal. Others, however, believe that char-

ter autonomy extends to decisionsabout whether or not teachers areunionized and what their contractsshould entail. Amid this continuingdebate, the sector has recently seena handful of experiments across thecountry that suggest the twogroups might possibly work togeth-er—perhaps in ways that hold les-sons for the wider world of collec-tive bargaining in public education.Green Dot Public Schools is a net-work of charter schools in LosAngeles, California. As of early2009, Green Dot operates 18 high-

performing charter high schools in Los Angeles, serving children inneighborhoods where the traditional public schools are overcrowd-ed and underperforming. Green Dot’s teachers are unionized mem-bers of the Asociación de Maestros Unidos, an affiliate of theCalifornia Teachers Association and the National EducationAssociation. The Green Dot union offers teachers a streamlined con-tract that includes several job protections, such as the right to dueprocess before dismissal, but without many of the work rule restric-tions that make it difficult to pursue good school practices in the tra-ditional public school setting.

In the fall of 2008, Green Dot partnered with the UnitedFederation of Teachers (UFT) in New York to open a charter schoolin the South Bronx. The school’s teachers work under a labor agree-ment similar to the one Green Dot has with its teachers in LosAngeles. This school joins two others in New York City alreadyfounded by the UFT and staffed by UFT members. With support


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A handful of experiments

suggest that teachers’ unions

and charter schools might

possibly work together—

perhaps in ways that hold

lessons for the wider world

of collective bargaining in

public education.

from the Broad Foundation, the UFT charter elementary schoolopened in 2005, and the UFT charter high school in 2006.

For all of these promising signs, funders should be under noillusions about teachers’ unions. The nation’s two largest teachers’unions, the National EducationAssociation and the AmericanFederation of Teachers, have tradi-tionally viewed charter schools as adirect challenge to their members.Indeed, some union officialsbelieve the charter sector to be per-haps the greatest threat they face.Thus state affiliates of these organ-izations have opposed many of thelaws authorizing the establishment of charter schools. Many stateaffiliates have sought to weaken charter school autonomy as muchas possible while limiting funds available for the charter sector. Oneprominent donor in the field went so far as to describe teachers’unions as the charter sector’s “enemy number one.”

49


One prominent donor in the

field even went so far as to

describe teachers’ unions as

the charter sector’s “enemy

number one.”

Chapter V: Addressing CriticalOperational Challenges

A hallmark of the charter school idea is autonomy. Operating withindependence from state and district bureaucracies, a charter schoolis able to forge a coherent mission and to align all of the school’sactivities with that purpose. But autonomy comes at a price. Themore independently a charterschool operates, the more it is cutoff from the supports offered by anestablished educational system.For district schools, having a facili-ty is a given. Back office serviceslike financial accounting andhuman resources are handled bythe central office—though oftenineffectively. Governance is like-wise taken care of, through the dis-trict’s board of education.

Few charter schools would trade their freedom to obtain theseservices. The lack of support, however, creates operational chal-lenges that hamper the ability of charter schools to function as effec-tively as they otherwise could. Consider:

• Most charter schools spend some portion of their operatingfunds on facilities. (According to Ted Mitchell, CEO ofNewSchools Venture Fund, CMOs in the NewSchools portfoliospend an average of 13 percent of their revenues on facilities.)That’s money schools could use for instruction.

• Charter school leaders spend an extraordinary amount of timedealing with “back office” issues, from transportation to finan-cial reporting to building maintenance.

• Special education requirements apply to charter schools, as theydo to all public schools, pulling charters into the expensive andcomplex regulatory world related to children with disabilities.

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Charter autonomy creates

operational challenges that

hamper the ability of charter

schools to function as effec-

tively as they otherwise could.

• Charter governing boards are the legal entities responsible forthe school, yet many charter boards lack the expertise or train-ing to provide effective governance.

Though the support organizations available to address thesechallenges have improved significantly in the past several years,these issues continue to divert the attention of charter school lead-ers from their most important work: educating students. Whilethese concerns may initially appear tangential to a school’s educa-tional mission, they can nevertheless have a tremendous impact onteaching and learning.

These barriers also discourage potential K-12 entrepreneurs fromstepping into the charter arena. They make the prospect of operatingcharter schools less attractive, a disincentive which applies not only toindividuals and grassroots groups who want to start stand-aloneschools, but also to charter school networks. For many organizationswith the potential to scale-up a network of high-performing schools,these operational obstacles tip the scales against growth and expansion.

By addressing operational challenges, donors can achieve twinpurposes: improving the effectiveness of existing schools and help-

ing to prime the supply pump.Funders have sought to address thewhole range of operational chal-lenges in their states by fundinggeneral-purpose charter school“resource centers” or member asso-ciations. (Please see Chapter I: “ForNational and State-by-state CharterInformation.”) “We support severalstate charter associations, because

they help create an environment that leads to high-quality charter-ing—in terms of regulatory and legislative environments—but also bydirectly helping schools with everything from governance to businessplanning,” explains Jim Blew, director of K-12 education reform forthe Walton Family Foundation. These charter support organizationsoften provide individualized technical assistance by answering spe-cific questions or connecting a school with resources on a range ofissues (e.g., facilities, accounting, legal compliance, professionaldevelopment, and assessment). They also offer generally availablenewsletters, websites, publications, workshops, and conferences, aswell as advocate for more charter-friendly public policies.


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Operational challenges

divert the attention of

charter school leaders from

their most important work:

educating students.

Ideas for New Funders• Join forces with other donors to create a loan guarantee pool

for facilities—either for construction or renovation—at localcharter schools.

• Fund a pilot program that provides critical back office servicesto a range of stand-alone charter schools in the area.

• Contribute to cooperative projects to make charter schoolsmore attentive to the needs of special education populations.

• Develop or support a leadership training program for boardmembers at local charter schools.

• Provide general operating support for excellent local charterschools.

In addition, donors have zeroed in on specific challenges, seeking tobuild an infrastructure of support for charter schools in the areas offacilities, back office services, and special education.

Facilities Financing and DevelopmentFinancing facilities regularly tops the list of tough issues facingcharter schools. Real estate is expensive to begin with, let alone thecosts of refitting a building for use as a school. Affordable financingis often hard to secure. Because charter schools can go out of busi-ness or be shut down for poor performance, lenders and investorsoften see them as a risky investment. Exacerbating the perceivedrisk is the fact that charter schools are often start-ups, run by peoplewith little experience in real estate. Financiers charge a premium tocover these perceived risks, and charter schools end up paying morefor financing than do regular school districts.

There is a measure of truth to these perceived risks. A charterschool, like any small start-up, can fail. The subsequent closure ofthese schools is one of the strongest aspects of the charter account-ability bargain. But starting a new charter school is not the unchart-ed territory it once was: many applicants, donors, and charterauthorizers have become more sophisticated about the critical ele-ments of a successful start-up. In addition, the facilities risks createa circular dilemma for many new charter schools. As a 2005 studycommissioned by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation puts it,“Securing a long-term lease or mortgage helps a charter school tostabilize, attract students, and survive—but it cannot strike such adeal because of concerns that they won’t survive.”

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Ad d r e s s i n g C r i t i c a l O p e r a t i o n a l C h a l l e n g e s

The facility-financing sector for charter schools has improved inrecent years. In large part, this welcome development is due to sup-port from the U.S. Department of Education and its CreditEnhancement Program, which funds nonprofits to develop facili-ties financing initiatives. A 2007 report from the Local InitiativesSupport Corporation surveyed 25 private nonprofit organizationsthat provide facilities financing to charter schools, and found thatthey had together contributed over $600 million in direct financialsupport. Despite these programs, however, obtaining facilities andaccess to financing remains difficult, especially for small charterschools and those in the first years of development.

Many argue that the long-term solution to the facilities chal-lenge lies in changing public policy to place charter schools on moreequal footing with traditional district schools, a subject taken up ina later section. (Please see Chapter VII: “Forging Charter-friendlyPublic Policies.”) But, absent those changes, what can donors do tohelp? Two broad strategies have emerged:

• Support for Individual School Facilities: This assistance maytake the form of a donated facility—perhaps the most directform of assistance. But it may also be a lease of a building forlow cost, or direct grants to a school’s capital campaign.

These direct investments may also take the form of loans orloan guarantees. To make charter schools a more attractiveinvestment for lenders and investors, several donors use foun-dation funds as a “guarantee,” backing up one or more charterschools’ debts. By placing funds into a reserve account or sim-ply signing a guarantee letter, funders can provide lenders witha degree of security—if a school cannot repay its debt, thedonor’s funds are available to make payments. This kind ofassistance is known as “credit enhancement” because it boosts aschool’s standing in the financial marketplace. Foundationshave sometimes used grant funds to set up these guarantees.Another increasingly common option is to use a “program-related investment” or PRI.


54

Program-related InvestmentsMost foundations disburse a relatively small proportion of theirfunds each year, leaving their endowments largely intact, if not grow-ing. Program-related investments (PRIs) provide a way for founda-tions to put that corpus of funds to work. Unlike grants, PRIs areinvestments made with the expectation that the capital will return tothe foundation within an established time frame. PRIs includefinancing methods commonly associated with banks or other privateinvestors, such as loans or loan guarantees. Funders in the chartersector have found them a particularly appropriate form of assistancewhen the grantee has the potential for generating income that wouldallow them to repay the donor’s initial investment.

“The charter sector cannot continue to expect philanthropy toprovide the entire amount of capital required to grow these expand-ing charter networks to scale,” explains John Lock, CEO and presi-dent of the Charter School Growth Fund. “If we instead use loansthat will eventually be repaid and can be given to someone else, wecan build long-term sustainability from both a philanthropic and anorganizational perspective.”

Another option for those who want to assist with individualschool facilities is the arrangement of shared-facilities agree-ments between district and charter schools. As charter schoolsacross the country clamor for affordable school space, several dis-tricts are simultaneously facing declining enrollment and under-used school buildings. Where local leaders are able to overcomethe divide between charter and district schools, the charter sectorhas seen several examples of shared facilities between charter-and district-run schools.

Charter Schools as a District StrategyIn too many places, existing school districts have hindered the intro-duction of charter schools. Some district leaders, however, havebegun to think differently about the potential of chartering as a dis-trict strategy for improving education. These leaders realize thatchartering can play an important role in overall school improvement.And donors are beginning to back some of their pioneering efforts.

Some districts are working with charter school networks toallow them to take over the operations of underperforming districtschools by converting them to charter status. One advantage of this

55


arrangement is that it typically allows the charter school to use thedistrict facility. Mastery Charter Schools, for example, is a local net-work of charter schools in Philadelphia that works to convert low-performing district schools into charter schools. Mastery’s arrange-ment with the district works this way: to upgrade the district’s facil-ity to meet its needs, Mastery obtains its own construction loan fromThe Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community investment groupbased in the Mid-Atlantic region that has funded (among otherthings) over 24,600 charter school slots. Mastery itself then con-tracts for the improvements. Because there are fewer restrictions onMastery’s contract than on the district’s, Mastery is able to get thesame work accomplished for less money. Then the district buys theimprovements back from the school and gives Mastery a long-termlease for the facility. This strategy allows Mastery to obtain a customfacility at very low cost—and keeps valuable public facilities fromgoing to waste.

Other districts are engaging in facilities-sharing arrangementsin part to foster sharing of best practices between charter schoolsand district schools. One such example comes from Houston, Texas,where a charter school in the YES Prep network is sharing spacewith Lee High, a district-run school. (It helps, notes Larry Faulkner,president of Houston Endowment Inc., that in Houston there is“such a healthy relationship between the district and the leadingcharter schools.”) The initiative is supported in part by the Michael& Susan Dell Foundation, which funded a consultant to help workout the details of the co-location before the school opened in 2007,and is providing operational support for the first three years. In2008, with support from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and acoalition of more than 30 local businesses, a KIPP school inColumbus, Ohio, began leasing facilities from the Columbus PublicSchools. The new campus occupies a recently closed district-runschool. In exchange for the space, the district will be able to incor-porate KIPP students’ achievement scores in its overall accountabil-ity ratings—“a carrot,” says Terry Ryan of Fordham, “for the districtto partner with KIPP.”

Districts like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia have alsoturned to new charter school creation as a way to diversify theirportfolio of reform strategies, so that they are not exclusively invest-ed in efforts to fix their existing schools. New York City, for example,


56

has attracted tens of millions of private dollars to match the consid-erable public resources the city has pledged for new charter schoolsthrough such vehicles as the New Century High Schools Initiative,managed by the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools. Manycharter school advocates advise caution when it comes to district-ledchartering, because limits on the independence of charter schoolscan undermine their promise. But in districts where the leadershipis committed to chartering truly independent schools, funders havebegun to test the waters.

• Support through an intermediary that specializes in facilitiesfinancing or development for charter schools. These intermedi-aries specialize in providing financing directly to charterschools or helping them obtain financing. Organizations havesprung up around the country to provide facilities financingassistance, many with significant philanthropic funding.Several have also received grants through the U.S. Departmentof Education’s Credit Enhancement Program, including:

• The Reinvestment Fund• The Housing Partnership Network, Inc.• Illinois Facilities Fund• Low Income Investment Fund• Center for Community Self-Help• Charter Schools Development Corporation• Community Loan Fund of New Jersey, Inc.• Raza Development Fund• Local Initiatives Support Corporation

Another type of facilities assistance comes through “development”intermediaries, which find, renovate, and lease buildings to charterschools. This type of intermediary is similarly able to secure betterfinancing terms than a new charter school could. More to the point,it also takes on the facilities burden, freeing up the school’s staff andboard to focus on educating students. Examples of this type of inter-mediary organization include Civic Builders in New York andPacific Charter School Development in California.

(Please see the sidebar titled “Bricks and Mortar.”)

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Bricks and MortarSeveral donors have explored ways to use foundation resources tomitigate the risk of lending to or investing in charter schools. Hereare four examples.

With support from Prudential Financial and the WaltonFamily Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation(LISC) provides facilities financing for individual charter schoolsthroughout the country. And through its Educational Facilities Loan& Guaranty Fund, the Educational Facilities Financing Center atLISC works to develop and expand local educational facilities fundsacross the country. Walton’s funding has taken the form of both pro-gram-related investments and grant money for operations. LISC hasinvested in local funds in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Massachusetts,upstate New York, and southwestern Pennsylvania, along with thenational network of KIPP schools.

In Indianapolis, LISC has partnered with the city governmentand the Annie E. Casey Foundation to make up to $20 million inloans available to qualified charter schools through a recentlyformed Charter Schools Facilities Fund. Charter schools can borrowtax-exempt debt for the acquisition, construction, renovation, andleasehold improvements of their facilities, and will pay lower rateson the loans because of the city’s backing and $2 million in guaran-tees provided by AECF and LISC.

Building Hope, a nonprofit intermediary based inWashington, D.C., likewise offers facilities assistance to charterschools. With support from the Sallie Mae Fund and the WaltonFamily Foundation, Building Hope makes below-market loans tocharter schools for facilities acquisitions and improvements, andprovides loan and lease guarantees to help charter schools acquire,construct, or renovate school facilities. Since its inception in 2003,the organization has provided 15 loan- and lease-guarantees worth


58

Back Office ServicesTeaching and learning take center stage in schools. Behind thescenes, however, back office activities are essential to make theteaching and learning operation run smoothly. Financial manage-ment—accounting, payroll, reporting, and the like—is one impor-tant back office component. Other components include informationmanagement, food service, and transportation. Charter schoolseither have to provide these services themselves or find outside ven-

more than $9 million, which have enabled financial transactionsworth over $100 million.

The Charter School Growth Fund has also assembled a fund, theCSGF Revolving Facilities Loan Fund LLC, to offer its CMOgrantees short- and medium-term financing for facilities, allowingthem to grow their networks of schools without scrambling everytime they want to acquire a new property. This fund combines PRIsfrom foundations with funding from more traditional lenders likeCitiBank. Once the networks have a record of achievement and sta-bility, CSGF will assist its grantees in finding more permanentfinancing, such as bonds or traditional loans, which will allow themto pay off their CSGF loans. Those funds will then be recycled backto the CSGF, to be used for another CMO. “We expect that our loanswill all be repaid to us so that we can redirect those funds toward aninvestment in another organization,” says John Lock, CEO of CSGF.“I believe this is the best way to support long-term sustainabilityfrom both an organizational and philanthropic perspective. It alsoenables us to offer organizations in our portfolio the opportunity,once they have paid back the loan, to provide funds in the nextround—a pay-it-forward approach.”

Civic Builders, a nonprofit facilities developer based in NewYork City, serves the “development” intermediary role in the charterschools facilities challenge. While most intermediaries provide orguarantee loans for charter schools to make financing more afford-able, Civic Builders finds, purchases, and refurbishes buildings, andthen leases them at affordable rates to charter schools. With supportfrom NewSchools Venture Fund, the Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation, theMichael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Annie E.Casey Foundation, Civic Builders allows charter schools to focus onimproving their academic programs rather than on navigating theNew York City real estate market.

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dors. “Doing it yourself ” saps valuable time and energy, while themarket for vendors is highly fragmented and often unreliable, leav-ing charter school leaders with no easy solution.

Funders across the country have used a couple of strategies toresolve these operations challenges. Several provide direct supportto schools themselves, offering technical assistance and training inareas where they see grantees across the board needing help. TheNew York City-based Tiger Foundation, for example, found that sev-

eral of their grantees struggled with finances and allocating costsacross multiple program areas. “This became especially critical fol-lowing September 11th when many agencies were hit hard by fund-ing cuts and needed to think strategically about how tomanage theiragencies through difficult times,” says Phoebe Boyer, executivedirector of the Tiger Foundation. “As a result, we organized agrantee-wide technical assistance initiative around financial man-agement, with targeted one-on-one follow up.”

For the most part, Tiger subsidized this technical assistance,according to a case study of the initiative by the Bridgespan Group,though it did require grantees to contribute a portion of the costs toensure that the services were valued. The Michael & Susan DellFoundation, too, works with its CMO grantees to help them developmission-specific goals for the central office and individual schools.Through performance-management grants, the foundation helps itsgrantees develop processes that allow them to track their progresstoward those goals.

Another route is to fund local or regional charter support organ-izations that specialize in providing services to charter schools.

Some of these, like the New YorkCity Center for Charter SchoolExcellence, provide assistance tocharter schools across a wide vari-ety of topics. The NYC Center waslaunched in 2004 with support froma group of foundations—includingthe Pumpkin Foundation, theClark Foundation, the RobertsonFoundation, and the Robin HoodFoundation—and with the backingof Joel Klein, chancellor of the New

York City school system. “We started the program to stimulate thesupply of high-quality charter schools in New York City, and to helpthem come together to negotiate for their best interests,” explainsPhoebe Boyer. The NYC Center provides charter schools with sup-port in leadership development, data management, facilities, andoperations.

Several funders have also supported the California CharterSchools Association (CCSA), a membership and professional organ-ization that provides a wide range of services to charter schoolsacross California. The CCSA’s services include start-up assistance,


60

Through performance-

management grants,

foundations help grantees

develop processes that allow

them to track progress toward

their goals.

leadership training, insurance policies, and a vendor network—all toallow schools to focus on their mission. New Schools for NewOrleans serves a similar role for all charter schools in the city.(Please see Chapter VIII: “Big Hopes for the Big Easy.”) Similarassociations and resource centers exist for charter schools in almostevery state, though not all are currently offering services as thoroughand wide-ranging as California’s. The Marcus Foundation, forinstance, has supported theGeorgia Charter Schools Association.The Kauffman Foundation has supported the Missouri CharterPublic School Association. Manymore examples could be added.

Other charter support organi-zations specialize in providingschools with particular types of assis-tance. The Innovative SchoolsDevelopmentCorporation (ISDC),for example, provides facilitiesplanning and financing, operationsand financial management, andinformation on best practices forcharter schools in Delaware. ISDCwas initially funded in 2002 by theRodel Foundation of Delawarebut has grown to become nearly self-sufficient financially based onthe fees it collects from schools. ISDC plans to begin to partner withsurrounding states on how to help turn around failing schools withthe hope of expanding its market to include district as well as char-ter schools.

Incorporated in 1999, ExED is a nonprofit that aims to create effi-ciencies for charter schools that result inmoremoney reaching the class-room and, ultimately, students. Thanks to support from (among others)the Ahmanson Foundation, the California Community Foundation,the Riordan Foundation, theWeingart Foundation, and the BroadFoundation, ExED’s clients never pay more than 5 percent of theirpublic revenues for services, which include payroll and employeebenefit processing, accounting, fiscal reporting, and audit prepara-tion. Through its client charter schools, ExED has served over15,000 students, approximately 70 percent of whom are eligible forfree or reduced-price lunch and about 30 percent of whom are clas-sified as English language learners.

In addition to catalyzing such administrative services, donorshave also helped charter schools provide or broker various kinds of

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Donors have helped charter

schools provide assistance

to their students beyond the

normal scope of “school,”

such as health, counseling,

and other social services.

assistance to their students and families beyond the normal scope of“school,” such as health, counseling, and other social services. TheRichard M. Fairbanks Foundation, for example, has supported thework of Learning Well, a local nonprofit that places a nurse inmany of the schools in Indianapolis. Fairbanks has contributed over$2 million since 2005 to fund these nursing positions and school-based clinics in all the charter schools across the city.

One crucial area where many start-up and stand-alone schoolsneed help is legal services.“Charters always need legal adviceand capacity on a range of issues,”notes Christopher Nelson, manag-ing director of the Doris & DonaldFisher Fund. “This is an area wherephilanthropy can make a big differ-ence.” To that end, the AtlanticLegal Foundation is a nonprofit

legal group that (among other things) advises, educates, and repre-sents charter schools. The foundation’s charter school advocacy pro-gram publishes a series of state-specific legal guides, written bynationally known labor law attorneys, to educate charter schoolleaders about what they must know regarding unionization efforts.It represents charter schools in court, free of charge, often as a“friend of the court,” focusing on broad policy concerns that havenot been developed adequately by plaintiffs and defendants. And itoffers legal advice, at reduced rates or at no charge, to charter schoolleaders, while linking charter schools with private-sector lawyersready and willing to provide representation.

Though back office services are often provided locally, someentrepreneurs have been asking if such services could be provided viathe internet across a state, or even nationally. For now, local experi-ments are on the frontlines of the back office services challenge.

Special EducationAs public schools, charter schools must be open to all comers,including students with disabilities. Many charter schools wereexplicitly formed to educate students with special needs; others havefound that large numbers of children with disabilities seek them outbecause of dissatisfaction with existing district schools. On top ofthe educational complexities of meeting a variety of student needs,special education also demands an intense focus on compliance with


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One crucial area where many

startup and stand-alone

schools need help is legal

services.

the dense thicket of relevant federal and state laws. Costs can be highand legal risks great—but the rewards can be great, too, and both theneed and opportunity are real. “We need a much greater investmentin helping charter schools figure out how to better serve studentswith special needs,” says Leslie Jacobs, former member of theLouisiana state board of education and an ardent supporter of char-ter schools in New Orleans. “If we truly want charter schools to offera better educational option for allstudents, this is a critical element.”

One way donors have addressedthis challenge is by helping schoolsform special education cooperativesin which they join forces to ensurethat they are providing a qualityeducation to students with disabili-ties and complying with all applica-ble requirements. The Annie E.Casey Foundation, for example, provided early funding for theDistrictof Columbia Charter School Special Education Cooperative.Through the cooperative, schools have access to special-education-related professional development and technical assistance, and canshare staff and enter into favorable arrangements with special educa-tion contractors. They are also in the process of working together todevelop a system through which schools can obtain reimbursement forsignificant costs through Medicaid.

Board DevelopmentCharter schools require a broad array of skills to operate successful-ly, so it is no surprise that the charter school boards who overseetheir operations also require a diverse pool of talent and experi-ence—talent and experience that is, alas, often difficult to come by.Boards are often dominated by one particular group—for instance,educators, business leaders, or the initial founders—that may lackthe comprehensive vision to guide schools. Additionally, boardmembers do not always fully understand the boundaries andresponsibilities of boards. They require assistance and training onhow to identify and recruit school leaders, frame a school’s approachto accountability, and chart a course without micromanaging.Boards that contract with management organizations also needtraining on how to ensure that the school’s best interests are servedin any management agreement they enter.

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Charter school boards require

a diverse pool of talent and

experience—talent and

experience that is, alas,

often difficult to come by.

One group of funders has addressed these challenges by givingpotential board members “hands-on” experience. At the BrighterChoice Charter Schools in Albany, New York, incoming boardmembers receive training in preparation for their service on othercharter school boards. Other nonprofits have provided less directsupport to a wider audience in the form of written guides for boardmembers.

Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsRemembering the Basics: General Operating Support

More important than the amount of any one particular programgrant is its format. Some of the CharlesHayden Foundation’s mostsuccessful grants have been capital and general operating grants.Those two forms of funding are always the most difficult to come by,especially general operating. Foundations have historically beenreluctant to dedicate money to general operating, yet it’s preciselywhat supports the infrastructure of the charter management organ-ization or stand-alone school. When we ask our charter granteesabout the funding, they always mention how much they appreciateour general operating funds. In fact, I think general operationsgrants are even more important than capital grants, especially asother sources for capital grants have entered the stage since westarted funding charter schools.

Carol Van AttenVice president of programs, Charles Hayden Foundation

The schools use our money for a variety of purposes—it varies yearto year—from plugging holes to the cost of construction. Pluggingholes is important!

Kenneth MerinPresident, Charles Hayden Foundation

All of these developments in the infrastructure of charter schoolinghave the potential to help schools meet their operational challenges.But, for these services to work, charter schools need to seek themout. Whether they do so or not depends in part on the degree towhich the schools’ environment demands quality. Creating that kindof environment is the fourth strategic priority for building a strongcharter sector in the United States.


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Chapter VI:Defining and Improving Quality

In theory, the charter environment drives its schools toward quality.Charter school authorizers—the agencies that grant charters andhold schools accountable—are responsible for screening out poorlyprepared applicants, overseeing schools, and closing down thosethat do not measure up. Families, now able to vote with their feet,are empowered to demand excellence from the schools their chil-dren attend.

After nearly two decades, however, experience has shown thatthese safeguards are not sufficient to ensure consistent quality.Charter schools can fail, and some have failed their students, andthe response can be, and often has been, inadequate. Nearly every-one in the charter school sector realizes that there needs to be muchmore attention paid to quality. As Janet Mountain, executive direc-tor of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, has explained, “Thesuccess of the charter school sector is at risk of being diverted by the‘break-the-monopoly-at-all-costs’ mentality. If we pursue growthand scale in the same old ways, it will inevitably result in similarsclerosis, bureaucracy, and declining academic results. Holding highstandards will be essential to achieving success as charter schoolsgrow to scale.”

Ideas for New Funders• Provide funding for a new charter authorizer to establish the

systems needed to choose quality applicants and hold schoolsaccountable.

• Help a group of local charter schools purchase (and get trainingfor) software programs that collect and analyze data on theirstudent achievement outcomes.

• Support a study comparing the learning results of local charterschools with similar district schools in the community, in thestate, and across the country.

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Part of this task involves improving the quality of authorizing. Funderscan also help directly by establishing measures and standards of qual-ity for their own school and CMO grantees. Philanthropy can high-light the charter schools that are achieving outstanding results. At thesame time, philanthropy can invest in the collection and dissemina-tion of research on charter schools to call attention to the schools thatare not fulfilling their potential.

Improved AuthorizingEvery state’s charter law anoints one or more bodies to serve as char-ter school authorizers. Depending on state law, authorizers may be

local boards of education, stateboards of education, universityboards of trustees, mayors, citycouncils, nonprofit organizations,or special-purpose entities creat-ed specifically for this purpose.

When authorizers do theirjobs well, they contribute to qual-ity in the charter sector on thefront end (allowing only qualifiedapplicants to open schools) andthe back end (taking action when

schools perform badly). When they do their jobs poorly, quality suf-fers. According to James Shelton III, former program director foreducation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (and currentAssistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at theU.S. Department of Education), “The Achilles Heel of the charterschool movement has been governance. The charter sector as a wholehas been too soft on getting rid of low-performers.”

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute conducted a nationwide studyof authorizers in 2003 (Charter School Authorizing: Are StatesMaking the Grade?).While the report found that “most major autho-rizers are doing an adequate job,” no state received a grade higherthan B+. The study pointed to numerous shortcomings in how wellstates support authorizers and how authorizers practice their crafts.The National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP), withfunding from several foundations, published a report entitledHolding Charter Authorizers Accountable: Why It Is Important andHow It Might Be Done to examine the causes and consequences ofpoor authorizing and explore how the problem might be fixed.


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“The Achilles Heel of the

charter sector has been

governance,” says Jim Shelton.

“The sector as a whole has

been too soft on getting rid

of low-performers.”

These studies are examples of one way that donors can helpimprove authorizing: by shedding light on authorizing policies andpractices. Funders have pursued a number of other strategies at dif-ferent levels:

• National: Several donors have supported the NationalAssociation of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), anorganization whose membership includes over 100 of thenation’s largest, most resourceful authorizers, and whose mem-bers oversee well over half of the nation’s 4,000 charter schools.NACSA holds a national conference for authorizers, promul-gates “principles and standards of quality authorizing,” conductstraining for authorizers on specific issues, provides in-depthassistance to particular authorizers, disseminates informationabout authorizing, and speaks for its members in policy circles.

• Local: In Indianapolis, Indiana, the Annie E. Casey Foundationprovided multi-year support to help then-Mayor Bart Petersondevelop a top-notch authorizing system. The grants enabled themayor’s office to invest up-front in the design of a rigorousapplication process, a thorough results-based accountabilitysystem, and a web-based source of information to familiesabout all public schools in Indianapolis. The office is now com-pletely funded through public dollars. Similarly, the Doris &Donald Fisher Fund provided resources to NACSA to helpCalifornia’s authorizers improve the processes they use to vetapplications.

Donor’s PerspectiveFunder as Authorizer: Lessons Learned from

the Fordham FoundationThe Thomas B. Fordham Foundation was an early and enthusiasticbacker of the charter school sector—and remains one to this day. In2005, it took its involvement into an entirely new field. Fordhambecame a licensed Ohio charter school authorizer, responsible forassuring the quality of the charter schools under its jurisdiction.Here Chester E. Finn Jr., Fordham’s president, offers his insider’sperspective on charter school authorization. (Or, as he quips, his listof “a dozen reasons why it’s hard to be a charter sponsor in Ohio—and why it took us so long to begin to get it right.”)

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D e f i n i n g a n d I m p r o v i n g Q u a l i t y

1. Like many sponsors, we “inherited” a bevy of already-estab-lished charters. Without us, they would have been orphaned—and maybe died. We thought we scrutinized these charterschools carefully before taking them on, but we weren’t carefulenough. We didn’t appreciate the extent to which they wouldarrive with their own idiosyncrasies, bad habits, and settledgovernance and staffing arrangements. Sometimes theseproved to be strengths, but too often turned out to be frailties.

2. Though we’ve wanted to open new schools, we labor under var-ious state-imposed charter “caps” that make it exceedingly dif-ficult to do so. Worse, the Buckeye State’s school-funding struc-ture makes it hard for charter operators to make ends meet.

3. The Ohio Department of Education, with which we have asponsorship contract, has provided minimal guidance as towhat the state expects of its charter authorizers. Its require-ments are unclear, even in key realms such as NCLB oversightof schools that do not make “adequate yearly progress.”

4. A lot of time and effort has had to be spent on “compliance” and“enforcement.” We have to comply with authorizer require-ments (processing forms, making reports, etc.) while overseeingschool compliance with innumerable laws and regulations.

5. Ohio’s charter laws and regulations have been altered andamended so many times in so many ways that parsing themresembles an archeological dig in Jericho, with layer upon layerof frequently conflicting rules, expectations, and procedures.Almost nobody understands how it all works—and many dollarshave been spent on attorney fees to try to make sense of it all.

6. The Ohio charter sponsorship “market,” now with more than 60authorizers, contains some perverse incentives—most notablythe incentive for a school, faced with plenty of choices amongsponsors, to go for one that creates the fewest hassles andcharges the lowest fees.

7. In Ohio, authorizers keep up to 3 percent of the per-pupil fund-ing that the state pays to the schools, which creates further per-verse incentives—namely, to keep alive as many schools with as


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many kids as long as possible, no matter how they’re doing edu-cationally. Authorizers wind up with so little money that theycan scarcely afford the staff and consultants needed to do thisjob right. If we didn’t have resources of our own (and help fromother foundations besides), authorization would bankrupt us.

8. Ohio’s authorization structure is fragmented and most autho-rizers aren’t accountable to anyone except themselves and theirconsciences. We could be “fired” by the Ohio Department ofEducation, but many other authorizers have a statutory “right,”grandfathered in legislation, to sponsor schools indefinitely, bethose schools good, bad, or indifferent.

9. The Ohio charter sector itself is fragmented, with too manycompeting interests, too much turf protection, too many“spokespersons,” too many organizations, too many paid lobby-ists, and too much greed.

10. The charter program in Ohio has been under constant attack bycritics. When they fail with the legislature, they turn to thecourts, the media, local government—anything they can do tocreate hassles for authorizers specifically and charter schoolsgenerally.

11. Charter doctrine says authorizers should close down bad andmediocre schools if they can’t shape them up—but what if, aswe’ve found time and again, the kids have nowhere better to go?A charter school may not deliver a high-quality education, butat least it’s safe and welcoming. Do we turn those kids out onthe street? Sentence them to a much worse district school?

12. Local politics matter, too. What does the authorizer do whenthe operators of a weak charter school are respected pillars ofthe community (and, often, of the minority community)?Without local support, the prospect for serious, lasting educa-tion reform in the community will not necessarily be enhancedby pulling the plug on community attempts to run a school.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. FordhamFoundation,senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, andsenior editor of Education Next.

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1 Recognized as one of the premier artsschools in the country, Orange County HighSchool of the Arts serves 1,300 students inthe 7th through 12th grades. Every day, stu-dents attend five hours of rigorous collegeprep courses and three hours of pre-profes-sional arts conservatory training. At a timewhen arts education has been squeezed fromtraditional high schools, this charter school’scomprehensive arts program, boasting 11conservatories, is a model of excellence.(Photo courtesy of Orange County HighSchool of the Arts)

2 Jim and Josie Danovich’s three childrenattend Chandler Preparatory Academy in thegreater Phoenix metropolitan area. Withevery student in uniform, interactive classesof fewer than 22 students, a full-blown ath-letic program, and an advanced collegepreparatory curriculum, Chandler Prep couldeasily be mistaken for an elite—and expen-sive—private school. But Chandler Prep is apublic charter school, one of six (and grow-ing) in the Great Hearts Academies network.Each Great Hearts school provides a classicalliberal arts education for grades 6 to 12, allwhile using fewer taxpayer dollars than tradi-tional public schools. By graduation, studentshave a foundation in grammar and rhetoric,logic and mathematics (with three semestersof calculus), history, natural science, philoso-phy, and the fine arts. Great Hearts memberschools are substantially outperforming theirlocal district school counterparts, and manynearby private schools, on state tests and theSATs. (Photo courtesy of Great HeartsAcademies)

3 At Excellence Boys Charter School ofBedford Stuyvesant—where 98 percent of stu-dents are African-American, and 62 percentqualify for the federalmeals program—100per-cent of fourth graders achieved proficiency inmath and 97 percent achieved proficiency inreading on the 2008 New York State exams. Amember of the Uncommon Schools network,Excellence Boys is serving as a pathfinder forsingle-sex education models—especially for all-boys schools—at a time when the achievementgap betweenmale and female students is grow-ing at an alarming rate. (Photo courtesy ofAnna Mia Davidson)

4 Roughly 5,000 people attended theHarlemSuccess Academy Charter School lottery lastyear—and only 600 student slots were avail-able. The school belongs to a fast-growingchain of charter elementary schools in Harlemcreated by former New York City CouncilMember Eva Moskowitz. The network hasmobilized families into a group called HarlemParents United, and parents have demonstrat-ed en masse at public hearings in support ofparental choice and education reform. (Photocourtesy of Success Charter Network)

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5 Located in Texas’ Rio GrandeValley, one of America’s poorestrural regions, IDEA PublicSchools is one of the nation’shighest-performing charterschool networks. IDEA’s modelincludes high-quality teachertraining, rigorous InternationalBaccalaureate and AP curricula,an extended school day and year,and high expectations for all stu-dents, many of whom are recentimmigrants. (Photo courtesy ofJohnny Quiroz)

6 During a 2008 visit to Houston,Bill and Melinda Gates talk withtwo KIPP (Knowledge Is PowerProgram) students at SHINE Prep,KIPP’s first early childhoodandele-mentary school. Houston is thestaging ground for anunprecedent-ed experiment:KIPPandYESPrepPublic Schools, two of the nation’shighest-performing charter net-works, will grow to over 50 schoolsin the next 10 years, serving nearly15percent ofHoustonpublic schoolstudents. The expansion—one thathas already inspired $120 millionin philanthropic support—willdraw intense scrutiny, andmaypro-vide an answer to a key questionconfronting the charter sector: Cancharter schools achieve significantmarket share in one location whilemaintaining exceptional quality?(Photo courtesy of the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation)5

7 Hurricane Katrina devastated what wasone of the nation’s worst public school sys-tems. In its wake, however, is a glimmer ofhope: the chance to remake, from scratch,an urban education system. This rareopportunity has ignited local reformersand attracted to New Orleans some of thenation’s most entrepreneurial educationleaders. Now at 55 percent, New Orleans’charter schools’ market share is the highestin the nation. (School reformers at S. J.Green Charter School in New Orleans.Photo by Brian Smith for TIME)

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8 Launched in 2000, High Tech Highimmerses students in a rigorous learningenvironment that emphasizes math,engineering, and science. The charterschool organization, which currentlyoperates nine K-12 schools in San Diego,California, recently opened a graduateschool of education, the first GSE embed-ded in a K-12 community. The programhas had tremendous success credential-ing teachers in math and science, who aregenerally in short supply. (Photo courtesyof High Tech High)

9 Eileen and Dennis Bakke, co-founderand longtime chief executive of energycompany AES, discuss a science lessonwith second graders at ImagineFoundations Public Charter School inUpper Marlboro, Maryland, one of 72public charter schools operated by thecouple’s Imagine Schools organization.Launched in 2003 and originally a for-profit charter school operator, ImagineSchools works in 12 states and theDistrict of Columbia, serving nearly35,000 students nationwide. (Photocourtesy of Craig Herndon)

10 At the nationally acclaimed YES PrepPublic Schools—where 96 percent of thestudents are black or Latino and over 85percent qualify for the federal meals pro-gram—college acceptance is a graduationrequirement. Since 2001, eight classes ofYES Prep seniors have graduated and 100percent have matriculated at four-year col-leges or universities, including Harvard,Yale, Columbia, Notre Dame, Stanford, andthe University of Texas. Over 90 percent ofYES Prep graduates are the first in theirfamilies to attend college.

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Collection and Dissemination of Data and ResearchEven as donors have supported the improvement of authorizing,many have asked: “Who holds the authorizers accountable? What ifauthorizers are approving shoddy applications, or falling short intheir accountability duties?” Realizing that some authorizers are notproviding the needed focus on quality, some funders have also sup-ported third-party information providers who make data available

on schoolperformance,withoutbeingtied to an authorizer or school. Forinstance, the Broad Foundation, theDaniels Fund, the Bill & MelindaGates Foundation, the RobertsonFoundation, and the William andFlora Hewlett Foundation havebeen at the forefront of such effortsthrough their support ofGreatSchools.net and its affiliatedwebsite CharterSchoolRatings.org,which include informationonall pub-

lic schools—and specifically on charter schools. Funders can contribute tonational efforts like these, or fund local or state initiatives to provideinformation—like Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now(ConnCAN)’s report cards onall public schools inConnecticut, includingcharter schools.

Nationally, information technology and growth modeling havematured significantly, allowing more information on public schoolperformance than has been available ever before. Amid thesechanges, efforts have increased to gather and disseminate informa-tion about charter schools, their students’ performance, and theconditions that contribute to their success. It is a movement towhich donors can make a significant contribution. Ted Mitchell,CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, has nonetheless noted that, todate, “philanthropy in general has been slow to support research—which is the result, in large part, of a salutary bias toward action. Butit is time for us to start learning what the really successful charterschools and charter networks are doing well—to study their ‘secretsauce’ of educational achievement—so that the charter sector canbegin to engage in a sustained effort to replicate their effects.”


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Funders have supported

third-party information

providers who make data

available on school

performance, without being

tied to an authorizer or school.

Today, many charter-related research projects are underway.The list below provides just a sample:

• Several donors—including the Achelis & BodmanFoundations, the Heinz Endowments, the Rodel CharitableTrust, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Daniels Fund, theFisher Fund, the Fordham Foundation, the Gates Foundation,the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the WaltonFamily Foundation—thoughtit necessary to create a non-partisan clearinghouse forresearch on the charter sector.Those donors drove the cre-ation of the National CharterSchool Research Project at theUniversity of Washington’sCenter on Reinventing PublicEducation. Recent reportsfrom the project includeQuantity Counts: The Growthof Charter School Management Organizations, Inside CharterSchools: A Systematic Look at Our Nation’s Charter Schools, andmultiple editions (most recently, 2008) of Hopes, Fears, &Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools.

• The Joyce Foundation has contributed $100,000 to a longitu-dinal evaluation of charter schools in Ohio, Wisconsin, andIllinois conducted by the RAND Corporation.

• The Walton Family Foundation has supported a major charterschool data collection and analysis project at the HooverInstitution’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes(CREDO). This project has become linked with an initiativethat includes the National Alliance for Public Charter Schoolsand the National Association of Charter School Authorizers(NACSA) to define a set of performance measures to guidechartering in the future.

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Information technology and

growth modeling have

matured significantly, allowing

more information on public

school performance than has

been available ever before.

• The Annie E. Casey Foundation has funded a series of reportsby the Progressive Policy Institute and the non-partisan thinktank Education Sector examining states’ experiences withcharter schooling and the role of state charter laws in shapingthe health of their charter school sector. It has also funded arecent report that analyzes findings across the series to makerecommendations about how states can improve their charterlaws and the policies that govern their operations.

A recent and particularly strategic investment in research comesfrom the Boston Foundation, which funded Informing the Debate:Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot, and Traditional Schools.

Conducted by scholars fromHarvard, MIT, Michigan, andDuke, the January 2009 studyfinds that Boston charter schoolsare doing significantly better thanpilot schools in raising studentachievement. (Pilot schools are

essentially public schools with flexibility over budgets, staffing, cur-ricula, and scheduling, but which remain part of the local school dis-trict and subject to the collectively bargained pay scales and senior-ity protections—a sort of halfway point between district and charterschools.) Because the study was designed to reduce the possibilitythat charters might benefit from having more motivated studentsand parents, its results are all the more striking.

Among its other key findings, the report determined that theimpact of charter schools relative to pilot schools was particularlydramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent ina charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achieve-ment gap. Performance in English language arts significantlyincreased among charter middle school students, though somewhatless dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger perform-ance scores in high school, in English language arts, math, writingtopic development, and writing composition.


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There is not yet a widespread

consensus on what “quality”

means in the charter sector.

Definitions and Standards of QualityIn the charter sector’s early days, the focus of charter advocates—and many donors—was on rapidly expanding the number of charterschools. Expansion is still a priority for most charter donors, butincreasingly funders have begun to demand that the schools andschool networks they fund achieve substantial results with students.In fact, many donors now express an urgency around defining andinsisting upon excellence. As LoryPilchik of the Michael & SusanDell Foundation explains, “Westrongly believe that we mustrequire charters to demonstratemuch more clearly that they areproducing significantly better aca-demic results for students. If theycan’t demonstrate this, they willcontinue to be vulnerable to poli-tics, to unions, and to parents.”

There is not yet a widespreadconsensus on what “quality” meansin the charter sector. The Building Charter School QualityConsortium project has served as a leader in the effort to establisha consensus among reformers, nonprofits, and foundations to createa set of academic and operational performance measures and prac-tices that define quality charter schools. Guided in part by theMichael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and theAnnie E. Casey Foundation, the consortium has published AFramework for Academic Quality, which sets out a foundation andstarting point for assessing academic quality in charter schoolsacross the nation.

The Walton Family Foundation is very explicit about its defini-tion of quality among its charter grantees. “We are agnostic aboutwhich curriculum or assessment tools that schools use,” says JimBlew, the foundation’s director of K-12 education reform. “But weare not agnostic about the rigor of those tools. We are very straight-forward with our grantees that we expect them to dramaticallyincrease student achievement, as measured by standardized tests inmath and reading. We understand that there are other ways ofmeasuring quality—attendance rates, graduation rates, etc.—and wewant to hear about those, too. But, at the end of the day, we want toknow that grantees are actually raising student achievement.” To

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Expansion is still a priority for

most charter donors, but

increasingly funders have

begun to demand that the

schools and networks they

fund achieve substantial

results with students.

help its charter schools collect and analyze performance data, thefoundation encourages schools to include in their start-up requestsfunds for implementing student information and formative assessmentsystems to continuously improve their operations and instruction.

Donor’s PerspectiveStandards and Definitions

The philanthropic community needs a stronger collective voicearound high standards and must work together to define what thatmeans. As a community, we must ensure that we’re systematicallybuilding the capability to improve quality across the charter sector.

Lory PilchikPortfolio director, U.S. Education, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

By the same token, one of the main goals of the Michael & SusanDell Foundation’s charter investment portfolio is to give schools theability to track performance and respond as necessary. Through per-formance-management grants, the foundation works with theschools and CMOs it invests in to help develop mission-specificgoals and support the development of processes that will allow theCMOs to develop action plans based on the collected data. To helptrack the performance of its own charter grantees, the foundationhas developed an internal outcomes reporting database that consol-idates all of the data about its schools’ performance in one place.

TheMichael & Susan Dell Foundation has also provided $3mil-lion over four years to the California Charter Schools Association(CCSA) to support California charter schools in their collection andanalysis of data. The CCSA will contract with a data managementorganization to pilot the program in 30 Los Angeles charter schools,and plans to eventually roll out the program across the state.


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Donor’s PerspectiveEnsuring Return on Investment for Public Charter School GrantsThe Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a national entrepreneurialphilanthropy that seeks to dramatically transform American urbanpublic education through better governance, management, labor,and competition. Investing in high-quality charter managementorganizations (CMOs) and charter-support organizations is a keypart of our mission.

Since 1999, we have provided nearly $100 million to the chartersector, primarily in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C.,and New Orleans. We fund the expansion of high-quality charterschools (e.g., Aspire, Green Dot, Uncommon Schools, NewSchoolsVenture Fund). We also provide charter facilities funding (e.g.,Pacific Charter School Development, Civic Builders, Charter SchoolGrowth Fund). Finally, we support charter leadership development(e.g., KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools) and advocacy (e.g.,California Charter Schools Association).

Each of our grants has a “performance dashboard,” which meas-ures whether or not the investment is paying off. The ultimatereturn is a significantly higher rate of student achievement by char-ter school students as compared with their peers, but we also tracka number of critical metrics to determine the operational effective-ness and financial sustainability of these nonprofit organizations.Below are a few examples of how we evaluate the grants in our char-ter portfolio.

Student AchievementFor grants made to charter management organizations, we measurewhether or not the charter school/CMO is improving academicachievement for its students faster than comparison groups. We usethe state reading- and math-achievement tests to determine:

• Absolute performance levels of the charter school as comparedwith comparison groups;

• Improvement in raising the percentage of all students meetingor exceeding proficiency;

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• Improvement in reducing the percentage of all students perform-ing at the lowest levels of proficiency (i.e., “below basic”); and

• Improvement in raising the percentage of black, Hispanic, andlow-income students meeting or exceeding proficiency.

We analyze this data on a school-by-school basis, and then count thenumber of schools within each CMO that are outperforming com-parisons groups. For charters, those comparison groups are:

• Host school district;

• Demographically similar schools in the host school district;

• The geographically closest school in the host school district; and

• The statewide average.

For charter leadership development programs, we run a similar stu-dent achievement analysis for each newly trained school principalplaced in a charter school. For high schools, we have started to ana-lyze college readiness data, including:

• Scores and participation rates on college-preparation tests(e.g., ACT, SAT, Advanced Placement);

• Graduation rates; and

• College-going rates.

We are also now developing a formal “return on investment” cal-culation that will enable us to take into account our financial invest-ment in comparison to student achievement levels. This “ROI” willhelp us compare our charter investments with other public educa-tion investments made by the foundation (i.e., grants to districts).


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Operational EffectivenessIn addition to student achievement measures, we look at a numberof critical operational and financial metrics to determine perform-ance. Some examples are listed below:

Area of Evaluation Sample MetricGrowth The CMO will operate 13 schools and

enroll 5,000 students by Oct. 2008.

Financial Sustainability Each school will be financially self-sufficient(using public revenue sources only) by theend of its third year of operation.

Financial Sustainability The CMO will meet its 2008 fundraisingtarget of $15 million.

Execution At least 80 percent of principals will ratethe home office operations as good or out-standing (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale in anannual survey).

Execution At least 80 percent of teachers invitedback for employment will remain.

Execution The CMO will provide facilities to eachschool at a rent less than 16 percent ofeach school’s operating budget.

The rigorous evaluation of our charter grants helps us understandwhich grantees are succeeding and which ones are not performingas expected. We review the performance dashboard with eachgrantee every year, and the information enables us to provide con-crete feedback and strategic counsel to the CMOs and charter sup-port organizations in our portfolio. The data also serves as a bench-mark as we consider new charter proposals, and helps us to sharebest practices across all of the foundation’s investments.

Dan KatzirManaging director, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

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Chapter VII:Forging Charter-friendly Public Policies

Nearly 18 years into the charter school movement, opposition tocharter schools remains well-organized, well-funded, and well-pub-licized. It has become abundantly clear, based on numerous exam-ples from across the country, that none of the philanthropic invest-ments discussed in the previous chapters will succeed unless morestates adopt charter-friendly public policies. Funders will neverbuild scale-with-quality where state laws flatly disallow chartering,tightly restrict the number of charter schools or authorizers, or reg-ularly impose undue regulation on charter schools. Indeed, the pub-lic financing of charter schools—which routinely under-funds char-ters relative to their district school counterparts—is itself a majorimpediment to scaling with quality. And without a critical mass ofhigh-performing charter schools, the charter school sector’s influ-ence on students, and on public education, will be minimal.

Ideas for New Funders• Fund a community organization hoping to provide accurate

information about charter schools to its constituents.• Develop a report to be disseminated to local leaders outlining

the benefits of charter schools.• Take local business and civic leaders to visit high-performing

charter schools in other locales.

“Our goal is to create more high-quality options for more low-incomechildren,” says Jim Blew, director of K-12 education reform at theWalton Family Foundation. “Many times that depends on the regula-tory and legislative environment surrounding charter schools.Investments in this area can be very powerful means toward creatinga healthy and flourishing policy environment for charter schools.”

Recognizing the central importance of charter school laws, manydonors have sought ways to educate policymakers and the public aboutthe kinds of policies necessary for the charter sector to thrive. Althoughthere are legal restrictions on a foundation’s support of advocacy work,there are still many ways in which funders can help make the case forcharter schools to both policymakers and the general public. (Pleaseconsult an experienced attorney for detailed information about thelegal parameters of philanthropic involvement in advocacy.)

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A central goal of such efforts has been the creation of organiza-tions with the capacity to conduct effective advocacy. Opposition tocharter schools—in many areas, led primarily, but not exclusively, byteachers’ unions—comes from well-funded and media-savvy organ-izations, many of which have years of experience, grassroots sup-port, and strong connections to elected officials. These organiza-tions seek measures that would restrict freedom and innovationwithin the charter school sector, by instituting policies such asmandatory union participation for teachers or requirements of acertain number of minutes of student seat-time in each subject.

Worse, they fight to “freeze” thenumber of charters well below thealready established caps, and evenattack the very existence of charterschools by claiming charters areunconstitutional. Without a clearand compelling argument for char-ter schools, anti-charter voices willbe the only ones whispering in theears of legislators.One natural way to bolster the

charter sector against such opposition is to shine a spotlight on itssuccesses. Funders can similarly support 501(c)(3) nonprofits thatbuild grassroots support and engage in advocacy work on a broaderscale, including some degree of direct lobbying. Reed Hastings,founder of NetFlix and an early investor in the charter sector, has alsosuggested that “investing in the traditional district system—as well asthe charter sector—helps diminish opposition by gaining credibility.”

Moreover, individuals—as opposed to foundations—are free tosupport charter school advocacy through non-tax-deductible contri-butions to candidates, political action committees, and lobbyingefforts. “Politics is essential for success,” says Hastings, “and becausepolitics are largely influenced by money, education reformers shouldconsider setting up 501(c)(4) entities to maintain an active politicalpresence.” Such a strategy can be tricky, however, and those interest-ed in making strategic political investments should contact otherfunders in the state to learn about this kind of giving.

Here are several different kinds of activities that donors canfund in support of charter-friendly policies.


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A central goal of the charter

sector has been the creation

of an organization with the

capacity to conduct effective

advocacy.

Building Grassroots SupportFamilies—especially families in poor communities—are often themost vigorous advocates of expanded school choice and chartering.Many funders have come to appreciate the need to cultivate thisgrassroots support effectively, and they have funded efforts to thatend. For example:

• Steve Barr, co-founder of Rock the Vote, helped form the LosAngeles Parents Union (LAPU) as a project of Green DotCharter Schools. Now an independent organization, LAPUcontinues to bring together parents to press for change in theLos Angeles Unified SchoolDistrict. By early 2009, LAPUhad enrolled approximately5,000 parent members. Whatis more, according to LAPUexecutive director Ben Austin,the Parent Revolution cam-paign is “growing by hundredsevery week.” These parents areadvocating and petitioning forimprovements to their localpublic schools and systemicchanges to the school district.Notably, LAPU has formed a partnership with ServiceEmployees International Union (SEIU). While many unionshave opposed charter schools, SEIU has embraced LAPU’sreform agenda because its members’ children are victims of fail-ing district schools. For almost a year, SEIU has formallyworked with Green Dot, providing LAPU both funding andtechnical assistance from experienced organizers. The BroadFoundation has also supported LAPU with significant funding.

• In Albany, New York, what began with the opening of two ele-mentary charter schools in 2002 has become one of the mostinteresting charter markets in the nation. Through the effortsof the Brighter Choice Foundation, which provides key phil-anthropic support and technical assistance, Albany is nowhome to 10 charter schools (9 of which receive support fromBrighter Choice). By the autumn of 2009, the charter sectorwill educate more than 25 percent of the city’s public school stu-

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F o r g i n g C h a r t e r - f r i e n d l y P u b l i c P o l i c i e s

Families—especially families in

poor communities—are often

the most vigorous advocates

of chartering. Many funders

have come to appreciate

the need to cultivate this

grassroots support effectively.

dents, with plans to enroll 30 percent of public school students by2010-11 and 35 percent by 2011-12. This rising market share hasbeen accompanied by aggressive parent organizing, with oneevent drawing 3,000 students, parents, and community mem-bers—impressive numbers for a relatively small city. Unionattempts to cap the growth of charters in Albany have beenrepeatedly blocked; three New York governors and two Senatemajority leaders, Republicans and Democrats, have backed theAlbany charter effort. Moreover, Brighter Choice, working withthe New York Charter Schools Association, recently won a courtcase blocking the application of prevailing-wage laws (whichmandate payment of union wages) to charter school facilities andservices.

• Eva Moskowitz launched the Harlem Success Academy 1 in2006 to meet the surging demand for quality schools amongparents in Harlem. With support from John Petry and Joel

Greenblatt (partners at GothamCapital, a Manhattan hedge fund)and other national foundations, theSuccess Charter Network is now aCMO, which added three moreschools in the summer of 2008, andplans to grow to 40 schools over thenext decade. Notably, Moskowitz, aformer city council member andoutspoken education committeechairperson for New York City, hasalso put her political skills to gooduse. She has mobilized families

through Harlem Parents United, and has brought thousands ofparents to public hearings in order to demand much-neededspace in public school buildings.

• In July 2007, the California Assembly passed a budget thatwould slash facilities support for charter schools serving high-poverty students to less than half of full funding and place char-ter authorization in the hands of hostile district school boards.The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) sprang intoaction, rallying parents, teachers, and community members on


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Moskowitz has mobilized

families through Harlem

Parents United, and has

brought thousands of parents

to public hearings to demand

much-needed space in public

school buildings.

behalf of charter schools. CCSA mobilized parents and teachersat a late-August rally in the home district of Assembly SpeakerFabian Núñez. The measures were ultimately defeated, and theCCSA has since kept the charter community apprised of, andengaged with, bills that affect charter schools.

• In 1996, a group in Tempe, Arizona—consisting of professors,engineers, and businessmen—collaborated to found ChandlerPreparatory Academy (originally Tempe Preparatory Academy).Their goal was straightforward:they wanted to provide theirown children with a first-rateliberal arts education, throughthe auspices of a public charterschool. Today, a network ofcharter schools based on theTempe model—the GreatHearts Academies—providesa content-rich liberal arts edu-cation to 6th through 12thgrade students across Arizona.Perhaps more importantly,these schools draw many mid-dle- and upper-middle-classfamilies into the charter sector. This represents a major strategicadvance, since these parents form a vital electoral constituency—with significant clout among policymakers—within which thecharter sector has not yet made inroads.

• The Boston Charter School Alliance was formed with$50,000 of initial support from the Boston Foundation in thesummer of 2006 to inspire and organize parents in support ofcharter schools. Member schools also contribute between$2,500 and $4,000 to support a full-time staff member, who isheld accountable for specific goals and results (such as, forexample, the number of parents who write to their elected offi-cials on behalf of their charter school). This effort was duplicat-ed by a second group of charter schools in Boston in 2007.

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Perhaps more importantly,

Great Hearts Academies draw

many middle- and upper-

middle-class families into

the charter sector—a major

strategic advance, since these

parents form a vital electoral

constituency.

• The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) is anational organization with local affiliates in many cities andstates. BAEO and its local offices exist to empower black fami-lies by providing them with information about their schoolingoptions and to advocate for the expansion of educational choic-es. Using cutting-edge media, as well as old-fashioned organiz-ing, BAEO is attempting to tap into and build upon communi-ty-based support for school choice policies.

• New Schools for New Orleans sponsors public and parent infor-mation initiatives—including print and online versions of the New

Orleans Parents’ Guide to PublicSchools—which help ensure that par-ents and community membersunderstand the charter model andare aware of the educational optionsavailable to their students. NSNOalso sponsored radio advertisementsto spread the word about charterschools, and helped create a local

office dedicated to providing parents with tools and informationthat allow them to advocate for themselveswhen choosing a school.

Supporting State-level Organizations that AdvocateStrong Charter PoliciesBecause most charter policies are set by state legislatures, everystate with a charter law (and many of those without one) has at leastone statewide organization dedicated to educating policymakersand the public about the need for stronger charter policies. Some areindependent nonprofits governed by parents, reformers, and com-munity and business leaders. Other pro-charter organizations aremembership-based, issue-specific groups known as charter school“associations” or “leagues.” Over the years, these organizations havesuccessfully led efforts to:

• lift or eliminate caps on the number of charter schools allowedin a state;

• expand the range of bodies that can authorize schools in a state;• increase funding for charter schools, or open up access to facil-

ities financing;


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Private philanthropic

organizations have legal

limitations on their ability to

engage in advocacy work.

• eliminate restrictions on charter school autonomy;• and repel efforts by charter opponents (such as teachers’

unions, entrenched school boards, and principals resistant tocompetition) to roll back chartering in state law.As noted, private philanthropic organizations have legal limita-

tions on their ability to engage in advocacy work. In particular, theythemselves cannot lobby or directgrant money for lobbying withoutbeing liable for a taxable expendi-ture, though they can fund someorganizations and projects thatinclude lobbying as part of theirwork. And a number of foundationshave indeed funded the work ofstate-level charter support andadvocacy organizations, such as theCalifornia Charter SchoolsAssociation, which serves as a strongstatewide voice for charter schools.The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation provided the Illinois Networkof Charter Schools (INCS) a $300,000 grant over two years to sup-port the development and dissemination of information about thestate’s charter schools to key public and policymaking audiences.

Philanthropic organizations can also sponsor educational ses-sions for policymakers on the potential role and benefits of charterschools. For example, the Gates Family Foundation of Colorado(not affiliated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) invested$10,000 over a decade ago in a one-day conference that brought inkey players involved in the establishment of the Minnesota andCalifornia charter laws. According to one Gates Family Foundationofficer, that conference “lit a fire under several Colorado policymak-ers and educators.” Within six months, the new charter school billbecame law. The foundation went on to provide vital seed funding forthe Colorado League of Charter Schools, which became a veryinfluential advocate of chartering in the state. Over the years, theleague has helped win legislative victories that have expanded facili-ties financing for charter schools and accomplished other vital goals.

This low-cost, high-leverage strategy has applicability acrossstate lines, too. Donors can fund site visits to other states, in orderto get key players to see the promise, and encourage the importa-tion, of successful charter schools.

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Every state with a charter

law (and many without one)

has at least one statewide

organization dedicated to

educating policymakers and

the public about the need

for stronger charter policies.

Grantmaking organizations may furthermore fund legal defensefunds against anti-charter efforts. For example, the CaliforniaCharter Schools Association has received funding from severaldonors to support its legal battle to enforce Prop 39, a measure thatentitles charter schools to the use of district-owned buildings.Passed in 2000, the law requires local school districts to providecharter schools with facilities that are “reasonably equivalent” tothose which students would be using if they were attending tradi-tional district schools. The CCSA has helped its members in severaldistricts obtain “equal treatment” under this law.

Leveraging Smaller InvestmentsFunding Legal Awareness

Every year, the JaquelinHumeFoundation funds the Atlantic LegalFoundation in New York to the tune of $30,000. Atlantic Legalengages in charter school litigation inNew York andNew Jersey; per-haps more importantly, it publishes the Atlantic Legal’s Guide toLeveling the Playing Field: What [State] Charter School LeadersNeed to Know about Union Organizing. The “[State]” in the subtitlevaries by publication, as Atlantic Legal puts out separate editions ofthese very helpful little books for individual states. It currently haseditions available for New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, andMichigan, with editions for Colorado and California pending.

Gisèle HuffExecutive director, Jaquelin Hume Foundation

Nevertheless, political work is often necessary—political work that fallsoutside the boundaries of allowable foundation contributions. Whenthat happens, private individuals often step in.Many education reform-ers, for example, have personally supportedEdVoice, a California-basedadvocacy organizationwhosemission is to give students and parents thesame advocacy voice as teachers, board members, and textbook pub-lishers. EdVoice lobbies for legislation and backs voter initiatives on arange of issues, including charter schools. (With the support ofCalifornia State Senator Jack Scott, for instance, in 2006 EdVoicehelped pass SenateBill 1655 to give low-performing schoolsmore powerover the teachers they hire.) Many of these private individuals havemade non-tax-deductible contributions to specific candidates for office,either directly or through political action committees. In most stateswith strong charter laws, such direct political funding has been invalu-able in creating a charter-friendly environment.


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Expert’s PerspectiveInvesting in Statewide Charter School Policy

In January 2005, a group of Connecticut philanthropists—alongwith leaders from the state’s business, higher education, and civiccommunities—came together to create the Connecticut Coalitionfor Achievement Now (ConnCAN). ConnCAN is a 501(c)(3) non-profit advocacy organization designed to catalyze the fundamentaleducation reforms needed to move Connecticut from worst to firston the achievement gap.

Jon Sackler, ConnCAN’s founding board chair, first becameexcited about the potential of charter schools to revolutionize urbanpublic education when he saw the great results achieved at NewHaven’s Amistad Academy. Sackler nevertheless quickly realizedConnecticut could not close its achievement gap by simply replicat-ing high-performing charter schools across the state. There were toomany statutory barriers, as well as a general lack of receptivity onthe part of numerous school districts. There was also the problem ofscale: Connecticut’s charter schools served only a few thousand chil-dren, while more than 100,000 students across the state were vic-tims of the achievement gap—and, even in the best of cases, scalingup the operations of a network of high-performing charter schools isa fairly slow proposition.

Presented with these challenges, Sackler and ConnCAN’s otherfounding board members decided to create an organization thatwould work to close the achievement gap through policy researchand advocacy. As executive director, a significant part of my job hasbeen to develop and pursue ConnCAN’s “Great Schools for All”reform plan—an effort that seeks to ripen the political environmentfor expanding high-performing charter management organizations,while at the same time working to create broader policy solutionsthat can be of immediate benefit to students remaining in the state’straditional public schools.

In its first several years, this strategy has delivered considerablereturns. ConnCAN has succeeded in generating a statewide debatethat takes for granted the need for systemic reform. It has moreoversecured concrete legislative support for key education investments.With respect to charter schools specifically, some of these advocacysuccesses include lifting the enrollment caps on the state’s charterschools, thereby allowing for a 40 percent expansion in enrollment;

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raising charter school operating grants by over $2,000 per pupil;and securing the allocation of nearly $50million in state bond fund-ing for charter school facilities. With respect to ConnCAN’s broadereducation reform agenda, successes include passing legislation thatallows Teach For America to come to Connecticut, funding astatewide longitudinal student data system, implementing a pre-school quality rating system, and significantly enhancing the state’sability to intervene in failing schools and districts.

When it comes to charter school advocacy, one of the clear lessonsfrom our experience in Connecticut is this: People who defend thepublic education system as it is currently constituted will argue thathigh-performing charter schools are irrelevant to the larger discussionof improving public education. Charter schools serve different stu-dents, they say, and play by different rules. The opponents of charterschools will say anything to prevent comparisons between charterschools and traditional district schools. Charter proponents are there-fore wise to invest in advocacy efforts to create statewide data systemsthat provide transparency about student enrollment and achievementacross the entire public school system. When state policy falls short,an independent effort can often do much to fill this need—asConnCAN has done with its online “School Report Cards” and “Top10” lists—providing easy-to-access comparative enrollment and aca-demic achievement data for virtually every public school in the state.

In the end, our experience suggests that even in a state with arelatively small charter school sector, when charter school advocatesembrace a broad theory of change, they can play a powerful role indriving a reform agenda that reaches across the entire system ofpublic education. Indeed, because ConnCAN’s advocacy for charterschools is an integral part of a broader reform plan that speaks tothe needs of all of the state’s public schools, policymakers have theopportunity to move beyond the notion that charter schools and tra-ditional public schools are locked in a zero-sum conflict. Rather, bysupporting the “Great Schools for All” plan as a whole, legislatorscan place their support for charter schools in the context of a com-prehensive program that benefits all of the state’s children, therebymaximizing the power of high-performing charter schools.

Alex JohnstonExecutive director, Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now

(ConnCAN)


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Supporting Nationwide Information and AdvocacyThough state-level work is central in charter advocacy efforts, thereare critical roles for national organizations, as well. Many issues arecommon from state to state, and national organizations are in aposition to gather and disseminate information to state-based advo-cates. And, though the federal role in charter policy is relativelysmall, there are significant legislative and administrative issues inWashington that affect charter schools. While the definition of pub-lic schools in many federal educa-tion laws (including No Child LeftBehind) encompasses charterschools, definitions in other partsof federal law do not. Many ques-tions about the law’s disparateimpact on charter schools remainunanswered, including how char-ter schools fit into federal specialeducation law and NCLB’s require-ments for highly qualified teach-ers. And the accountability provisions of NCLB have sprung intoeffect in many states, triggering options to restructure failing dis-trict schools as charters—territory which remains largely unex-plored. There is a great need for a national presence on behalf ofchartering to give guidance on these and many other issues.

Funders have helped numerous national organizations under-take such work. For example, the National Alliance for PublicCharter Schools works with support from several donors to increasepublic support and political understanding of charter schools on anational level by helping ensure that parents, the press, and policy-makers see chartering as a continuous-improvement model for deliv-ering public education. The D.C.-based Center for Education Reformalso advocates onmultiple levels (national, state, and local) for schoolchoice, works to advance the charter school sector, and challenges theinefficiencies of the education establishment. With respect to thecharter sector specifically, it helps support grassroots activismthrough weekly e-news updates, communications training, and col-laborative networking. Among its other publications, the Center forEducation Reform also rates state charter laws and compiles and dis-tributes an annual directory of charter schools across the nation.

As they have at the state level, individuals have also made sig-nificant non-tax-deductible contributions to national political

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Though the federal role in

charter policy is relatively

small, there are significant

issues in Washington that

affect charter schools.

organizations. All Children Matter (ACM)—which is a 501(c)(4)organization—works nationally to elect public officials who supportschool choice and education reform. Though the organization is bet-ter known for its support of private school choice, the candidates itbacks tend to support chartering as well.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, speaking onbehalf of businesses nationwide, has begun advocating charterschools as a means to ensure future economic growth. In October

2008, the Chamber issued a reportcalling on American businesses tosupport charter schools. “Publiccharter schools are without a doubtone of the nation’s most promisingefforts to produce more great pub-lic schools,” says Arthur Rothkopf,senior vice president of theChamber. “With the critical needfor a well-educated workforce, wemust do everything we can toincrease the supply.”

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is a lobbying,funding, and advocacy group launched in 2007 that supports highstandards, innovation and accountability in education—as well ascharter schools. The organization is a 501(c)(4), allowing it to lobbynationally in support of reform-minded Democratic candidates, andto advocate for legislation (such as, to take one example, a bill to liftthe cap on the number of charter schools in New York). Non-tax-deductible contributions to DFER come from individuals likehedge-fund investors William Ackman, R. Boykin Curry IV, CharlesLedley, John Petry, andWhitney Tilson. Private foundations like theBroad Foundation contribute to a related 501(c)(3), EducationReformNow. DFER has hosted rallies and events on behalf of char-ter schools both in New York and across the nation.

While these organizations work primarily at the state level, asnational entities they have access to a wider range of donors andexpertise in their work. They also have the ability to channelresources to places that need them the most. That imperative, com-bined with the growing number of national issues, and the strengthof the sector’s national opponents, all suggest that, moving forward,the charter sector will need ever more effective policy advocacy.


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“With the critical need for

a well-educated workforce,”

says the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce, “we must do every-

thing we can to increase the

supply [of charter schools].”

Chapter VIII:The Next Phase ofPhilanthropic Support

In several cities, donors have pooled their resources to simultane-ously pursue all five strategic priorities in a single region or city. Indoing so, they intend to build the charter sector to scale without sac-rificing its quality. Their ultimate goal? To create real alternatives inpublic school education, in the belief that choice will foster compe-tition, and competition will lead to systemic improvement.

Big Hopes for the Big EasyNewOrleans is generally regarded as presenting an especially prom-ising opportunity, since the post-Katrina landscape affords donors achance to help dramatically re-create the school system by saturat-ing it with high-quality charter schools. In New Orleans, local andnational foundations have collaborated to support the city’s newcharter school sector.

Before Hurricane Katrina landed in 2005, charter schoolsaccounted for only 7 of NewOrleans’ 126 public schools. But in 2008,39 of the 75 operating schools were charters, and charter schools helda 55 percent market share of students in Orleans Parish. For manyleaders in school reform, New Orleans offers the charter sector itsmost promising prospect for reaching the tipping point.

Working toward that end, multiple funders in New Orleans arecollaborating to improve the quality of local K-12 education, prima-rily through an intermediary organization, New Schools for NewOrleans (NSNO).

• Supply: NSNO, with support from several national and localphilanthropies, provides incubating and planning grants andassistance to help promising charter schools open and replicatein New Orleans.

• Human capital: NSNO is supporting the development ofhuman capital in the city’s schools by recruiting outstandingteachers and leaders and by partnering with TeachNOLA, TFA,and New Leaders for New Schools to address urgent humancapital needs.

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• Operational challenges: NSNO also provides new charterfounders with leadership training, operational assistance, legalassistance, board development consulting, and a charter appli-cation review. Moreover, operating schools receive support onday-to-day legal needs through NSNO’s pro bono attorney proj-ect.

• Improving quality: NSNO serves as a clearinghouse of supportfor school operators, providing ongoing assistance in the areasof human capital, academic quality, and school investmentresources.

• Policy environment: NSNO serves as a voice for charter schoolsin New Orleans and advocates on their behalf in the communi-ty, district, and state. NSNO also sponsors public and parentinformation initiatives to share information about public char-ter schools in the Big Easy.

Chartering GracelandMemphis, Tennessee, is another city in which private funders arepursuing all five strategic priorities simultaneously. InMemphis, theHyde Family Foundations have been especially active through mul-tiple channels. By confining their investments to one specific region,they have had a focused impact on Memphis schools.

• Supply: The Hyde Family Foundations provide planning grantsto promising groups interested in applying to open charterschools, make start-up grants, and offer hands-on technicalsupport to groups that have successfully applied for a charter.

• Human capital: Realizing that 57 percent of principals inMemphis were at or nearing retirement, Hyde invested in bring-ing New Leaders for New Schools to Memphis to recruit andtrain principals for local charter and district schools. Hyde hasalso worked to bring Teach For America to the city, and supportsThe New Teacher Project’s innovative Urban Teacher HiringInitiative, which seeks to increase the number of highly qualifiedapplicants for teaching positions in Memphis while creating asupportive environment where they can have the greatestimpact on student achievement.


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• Operational challenges: Through their leadership in the com-munity, Hyde helped convene the city’s banking and financeleaders to create facilities solutions for local charter schools.Statewide, Hyde has provided support for the technical assis-tance activities of the Tennessee Charter SchoolsAssociation.

• Improving quality: Hyde has funded a large-scale universityresearch project that will examine the effectiveness of charterschools in Memphis and provide support for Memphis’ soleauthorizer, the school district, to receive training and supportfrom the National Association of Charter School Authorizers(NACSA) on the development of its authorizing system.

• Policy environment: Hyde has worked to impact the policyenvironment in which charter schools and authorizers operatein Memphis specifically and Tennessee generally. Hyde alsopartnered with Tennessee charter advocacy organizations onthe initial passage of the charter law, as well as on subsequentstate issues.

Reaching the Tipping PointIn several cities across the country, charter schools have obtained asignificant market share of the local public school students. Othercities have not achieved scale, but boast a smaller set of charterschools which are strong academically. What has yet to be achieved,however, is a combination of scale and quality, where first-rate char-ter schools comprise a significant share of the public school market.Achieving that goal is the desire of many donors, large and small.

In Houston, for instance, funders have combined forces to pressfor significant market share, as the KIPP and YES Prep charter net-works plan to grow to over 50 schools in the next 10 years, servingnearly 15 percent of Houston’s public school students. The expan-sion has inspired over $120 million in philanthropic support from alarge group of donors—both within and outside of Texas—all ofwhom are keeping their eyes on the Houston “experiment.”

Albany is yet another example. Albany’s charter schools enrolledapproximately 22 percent of all public school students in 2008-09.As part of the Albany Project, the Brighter Choice Foundation andits partners anticipate that charter schools will attain over 25 per-cent market share in 2009-10, with plans to serve 30 percent of all

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T h e N e x t P h a s e o f P h i l a n t h r o p i c S u p p o r t

public school students in the city by 2010-11 and 35 percent by 2011-12. Even better, the scaled growth has been accompanied by contin-ued excellence. In 2007-08, charters backed by Brighter Choicescored first in math in every grade, and first in English language artsin the highest elementary and middle school grades.

In Newark, New Jersey, the Newark Charter School Fund(NCSF) is working with support from, among others, theMCJ andAmelior Foundation, the Victoria Foundation, the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation, the RobertsonFoundation, and the PrudentialFoundation. These funders are col-laborating to drastically increasethe market share of exceptionalcharter schools within the city.Taking advantage of the hospitablepolitical climate provided byDemocratic Mayor Cory A. Booker,NCSF seeks to growNewark’s char-ter sector to scale, without sacrific-ing quality. It will provideresources to aid mature schools,

incubate new schools, and invest in human capital, facilities, andadvocacy. Eventually, NCSF plans to spur reform within Newark’straditional public schools, and provide guidance and best practicesfor district and charter school reform outside the city.

Some funders caution that localized initiatives like these, andothers still developing across the country, will not necessarily trans-late to a “recipe” for a successful national expansion. But manynonetheless hope that this type of geographic concentration willhelp demonstrate the extent to which charter schools can affect thebehavior of traditional public schools—by competing with them forstudents and by developing innovative practices that can be adapt-ed within the traditional public school setting. Attempts to scalewith quality—already underway in Albany, Houston, Memphis,Newark, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.—may help reveal thetipping point at which charter school market share induces tradi-tional public school districts to reorient their structures and prac-tices toward student achievement.


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Many funders hope that

this kind of geographic

concentration will help

demonstrate the extent to

which charter schools can

affect the behavior of

traditional public schools.

Donor’s PerspectiveAccelerating the Charter School Movement

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation believes high-performingcharter schools offer important choices for quality education and canraise the bar for public schools overall. Concurrently, charter schoolshave an obligation to deliver a higher standard of student perform-ance and financial efficiency compared to other local public schools.Our funding for charter schools focuses on three primary goals:

1. Replicating quality charter schools;2. Building performance-management systems in charter man-

agement organizations (CMOs) that support growth whilemaintaining quality; and

3. Fostering charter association support organizations, at the stateand national level, that are driving movement-wide qualityefforts.

Over the last five years, we have committed more than $75 millionto charter schools. In 2008, we funded 14 charter managementorganizations that operated 137 charter schools with 37,500 stu-dents in 18 states.

Replicating Quality Charter SchoolsApproximately 40 percent of the foundation’s current charter-grantportfolio is focused on expanding quality schools in urban areas. Thefoundation has developed a methodology and tool to screen currentand potential charter grantees for student achievement results, lead-ership vision and capability, and effective resource management. Thetool helps us identify areas of strength and challenge, call out bestpractices, and target our funding. The tool also generates perform-ance comparisons to host districts, the neighborhood campus, andother high-performing CMOs, both regionally and nationally.

Perhaps the most instructive aspect for grantees is seeing theirperformance relative to other high-performing charter organiza-tions, rather than the typical comparisons made locally or state-wide. For example, the comparison on home office expenditures hasbeen a particularly useful benchmark for growing CMOs.

From our analysis we know that 54 percent of the charter schoolswe fund improved their performance from 2006 to 2007 by an aver-

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age of 10 percentage points. And 78 percent outperformed their hostdistrict by an average of 17 percentage points. It also reveals that whileCMOs perform consistently well with fewer than five schools, aca-demic performance becomes more variable as CMOs grow to morethan five. This finding in particular has compelled us to complementexpansion funding with strong performance-management systems.

Building Performance-management SystemsThe underpinning of quality growth for charter school organizationsis a strong performance-management system, the implementationof which accounts for more than 50 percent of our current portfolio.

Performance management is a best-practice approach to foster-ing a culture dedicated to accountability, collaboration, and infor-mation sharing by using technology to gather, analyze, and reportinformation. Designed to improve the academic performance of stu-dents, performance management provides administrators andteachers with insight into what’s working and what’s not, includingrelevant, timely information from the classroom to the boardroom—and the family living room.

Performance management means moving beyond the personal-ities that built an organization to a more systematic way of equip-ping each person with the information, skills, and incentives to pre-dictably drive organizational impact. YES Public Schools and KIPPAustin Public Schools were our first grantees to launch comprehen-sive performance-management initiatives. Over the last year, eachorganization has defined a dynamic scorecard with predictive stu-dent indicators designed to improve academic performance. Theyhave also defined a process of data inquiry and data-driven decision-making which creates routine opportunities for teachers, principals,and CMO staff to discuss student data and create action plans.Finally, each has defined a technology roadmap to streamline andautomate the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data. Thefoundation believes that performance-management efforts like theseare essential to sustaining high student performance as CMOs grow.


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Fostering Movement-wide QualityThe Michael & Susan Dell Foundation recognizes that, in order toraise the bar in public education, the charter sector must proactive-ly address performance within its ranks. We therefore fund andactively participate in efforts to implement meaningful definitionsof quality. At the state level, organizations such as the CaliforniaCharter Schools Association and the Texas Charter SchoolsAssociation are critical to serving the diverse needs within the char-ter sector. These organizations define quality standards for charterschools, deliver services to the membership that improve academicimpact and operational efficiency, and advocate on behalf of mem-ber schools. With the California Charter Schools Association, thefoundation is funding ZOOM! Data Source, a market-leading onlinedata tool and customized training platform that improves data-driv-en decision-making in order to increase student achievement incharter schools. To date, nearly 200 charter schools acrossCalifornia have signed on as participants.

At the national level, we are active participants in the work ofthe Building Charter School Quality Consortium, a partnershipof quality institutions that is working to help charter school opera-tors and authorizers strengthen their performance managementpractices. We believe this effort to define quality and make it anoperational reality is essential to the future of the charter sector andproviding a high-quality education to students.

This sidebar was composed by Zeynep Young (portfolio director,Texas), Lory Pilchik (portfolio director, U.S. Education), and Lori Fey(senior grant officer), all of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

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Chapter IX:Eleven Big Ideas in Need of Support

Many donors are getting involved in the effort to take the chartersector to the next level: scaling with excellence. But there remainmany unfunded projects which hold enormous promise for furthergains. Here is a list of some of the big ideas that are still in need ofsupport.

Idea 1: Leverage charter schools as the leading edge ofhuman capital reform.Charter schools enjoy flexibility and independence and operate onthe assumption of accountabilityand competition. For that reason,charters are ideally situated toserve as the leading edge of teacherand school leader effectiveness.Donors can help the charter sectorcapitalize on the opportunity.

One idea: create a venture phi-lanthropy fund that would under-write applied research and development by investing in innovativeideas along all links of the human capital chain. These investmentswould take advantage of the freedoms that charter schools enjoy toimplement the most promising human capital practices for maxi-mizing teacher and leader effectiveness. The fund could, for exam-ple, either support research on, or underwrite the implementationof, the use of value-added data to evaluate teachers, differentiatedpay tied to performance, and strategic staffing related to class size.

Another idea: create a national center that attracts and capturestalent for every level of leadership in the charter sector. Reform-minded donors are currently seeding leaders in a variety of pro-grams: Broad Fellows, New Leaders, BES principals, KIPP FisherFellows. The next step is to take the principle nationally by con-structing a national campus that includes four to six model schools,each with different delivery systems. Donors could help purchase asmall, struggling college and turn it into the best principal and C-level training institution on the planet. After all, the biggest obstacleto achieving quality at scale is finding the right leadership. It would

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Charters are ideally situated to

serve as the leading edge of

teacher and school leader

effectiveness. Donors can help.

be a genuinely useful achievement to create a school leader collegethat gets the best, makes them better, and sends them off to top-notch charter schools.

A final idea: donors can help the charter sector take advantageof its flexibility to explore alternatives to finding more people. Theycould, for instance, experiment with funding the deployment of afew, excellent teachers to significantly larger classes. As Chester E.Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, observed inthe Wall Street Journal, “During the past half-century, the numberof pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent, while the num-ber of teachers nearly tripled.… If the teaching force had simply keptpace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, andnothing else had changed, today’s average teacher would earn near-ly $100,000, plus generous benefits. We’d have a radically differentview of the job, and it would attract different sorts of people.”Similarly, donors could help the charter sector underwrite the devel-opment of personalized learning software, especially for hard-to-staff courses. There are much greater efficiencies to be found in K-12 human capital, and the philanthropic community is well-posi-tioned to help the charter sector find and implement them.

Idea 2: Identify and support promising charter leadersfromminority communities.Many aspiring minority leaders lack access to the resources neededto start up a charter school, let alone a new CMO. Sometimes they

lack financing; sometimes they lacksocial capital. Often, they lack both.This talent pool represents a largelyuntapped reservoir of inspired lead-ership. Partners For DevelopingFutures is a social venture invest-ment fund, created and incubated by

the Charter School Growth Fund in 2008. Partners invests in high-potential, early stage minority-led charter schools by finding andcultivating promising charter leaders from minority communities,with a special focus on bringing new actors into the charter schoolsector. It is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.Donors may want to consider priming the pump by creating a tar-


106

This talent pool represents a

largely untapped reservoir of

inspired leadership.

geted investment fund that would find, cultivate, and place promis-ing charter leaders fromminority communities. The fund could alsohelp start up high-quality charter groups led by minority CEOs, inorder to increase the number and visibility of African-American,Latino, and other minority charter school leaders.

Idea 3: Create a multibillion-dollar facilities fund.CMOs spend too much time worrying about facilities: Every minutea school leader spends thinking about infrastructure is a minute heor she is not focused on servingstudents. There is an urgent needfor a national facilities financingstrategy that would allow CMOs toconcentrate on the work of creat-ing world-class students ratherthan acquiring and maintainingproperties.

To that end, donors may wantto think about funding a multi-bil-lion-dollar facilities fund for high-performing (or high-promise)charter schools. The fund could in turn leverage foundation grants,PRIs, and federal credit enhancements to create a national (orsuper-regional) pool for facilities financing. If executed properly, thefund could even consider planning joint facilities—with a healthclinic, for instance, or community center on the same footprint asthe charter school. Such collaboration would provide a genuine“community resource,” with certainty about buildings and facilities,but with a clear distinction between the service providers and theirareas of expertise.

Another strategy might involve building the capacity of charter-holding organizations (Civic Builders, for example) to support facil-ities development in priority markets, and expand the use of avail-able incentivized tools (New Market Tax Credits, for instance).Donors could create a facilities development holding company—anational nonprofit entity that develops charter school facilities forthe best CMOs. The company could do more than provide loans. Itcould guide practitioners as they develop facilities, from beginningto end, and all the way through to ownership. CMOs would then be

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E l e v e n B i g I d e a s i n N e e d o f S u p p o r t

Every minute a school

leader spends thinking about

infrastructure is a minute he

or she is not focused on

serving students.

able to lease the facilities for 30 years at 80 percent of the marketrate. The below-market lease rate would be of tremendous value toCMOs, while the development and holding company would still bein a position to increase in value and develop other projects.

Idea 4: Fund the development of a “virtual” sharedback office platform.No matter how well a charter school serves its students, if its backoffice is a problem, it will never achieve its full potential. Today, the

potential of many charters is beingheld up by back-end considerationslike payroll, accounting, and audit-ing. In response, individual charterschools and CMOs are developingtheir own practices and standardsto help them manage their schoolsand operations. Their efforts, how-ever, are highly redundant. Donors

could help achieve an economy of scale by funding the aggressiveexploration of “virtual” back office solutions, online programs andproducts that would help charter schools operate more efficiently bystreamlining their budgetary, accounting, and finance practices. Asan added benefit, such systems could also help reform-mindedsuperintendents looking for similar solutions.

Idea 5: Devise sector-wide achievement metrics.Charter schools across the country are working on creating systemsand platforms to measure student academic achievement, gaugeschool performance, and provide data for sustained classroomimprovement. Unfortunately, their efforts have been largely piece-meal. According to many funders, what the charter sector needs asit continues to ramp up its efforts is a national common evaluationand quality framework for charter schools, including shared defini-tions of success and methods of assessment. The framework couldbe used not only across the investment community, but also by stateassociations, authorizers, parents, school districts, and CMOs. Somedonors, like the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, have begunstudying the issue, but there is plenty of space for additional philan-thropic exploration.


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Donors could help achieve an

economy of scale by funding

the aggressive exploration of

“virtual” back office solutions.

Idea 6: Incubate school-turnaround organizations.Under NCLB, if a school does not make “adequate yearly progress”for five years in a row, then its district must restructure the school inone of five ways: reopen it as a charter school; replace its staff; con-tract with a private management company to operate it; allow thestate to take it over; or implement another major governancechange. As more and more schools consistently fail to meet ade-quate yearly progress, many districts are exploring the controversialoption of closing these schools and reopening them as charters.

But there are vast differences between creating a charter schoolfrom scratch and reopening a troubled school as a charter. This is aspace ripe with both opportunities and pitfalls—for the charter sec-tor in particular, and for school reform generally. Donors could helpdiscover, document, and disseminate best practices—in terms of bothpolicy and school-level operations—in this niche educational sector,and could also incubate and support organizations that are able tosuccessfully take advantage of this unique policy opportunity.

Idea 7: Ensure equal access for charter schools inthe pre-K sector.Many urban communities (Washington, D.C., for example) have begunto provide a moderate level of per-pupil funding for three- and four-year-olds. As more foundations andpolicymakers advocate greateraccess and funding for pre-K—oftenwithout sufficient attention toschool quality, human capital,autonomy, parental choice, andaccountability—charter schoolsare poised to lead the way in shap-ing the pre-K landscape and setting the standard in pre-K for bothchoice and accountability. (In fact, such a philanthropic experimentcould be an exercise in building a system that avoids replicating thedysfunctions of the current K-12 education system.) Where state-funded pre-K exists, and where policy barriers prevent charterschools from playing a role—New York, for example—donors maywant to fund advocacy efforts to allow for charter school participa-tion. Where existing pre-K programs already allow charter schoolsto participate, donors can, and should, use charter schools todemonstrate how to “do pre-K right.”

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Donors can, and should, use

charter schools to demon-

strate how to “do pre-K right.”

Idea 8: Identify and support promisingmodels to serve thehardest-to-reach student populations, including studentswith special needs, drop-outs, and juvenile offenders.To date, most all of the support for the charter sector has been con-centrated on the national networks of high-performing charterschools, like KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, andGreen Dot. These schools target a general population of students,albeit a general population from low-income and minority commu-nities. As a result, very little attention and national philanthropicsupport have gone to deliberately identifying and supporting schools

that target the hardest-to-reachstudents—special education, forexample, or juvenile offenders, orEnglish-language learners. There isan opening here for entrepreneurialdonors to identify and supportpromising models for these at-riskpopulations. Those models could,in turn, inspire the same kind ofreplication efforts that have so fargone into creating schools for gen-eral education students. From the

perspective of the charter sector, if donors can create and scaleschools that serve the truly hardest to serve, they will have knockeddown one of the few legitimate critiques of charter schools, by prov-ing that charter schools can truly serve all children well.

Take New York City, for example, where it is estimated that138,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 21 are over-ageand under-credited (meaning that they are at least two years off-track, relative to age and credit accumulation, from earning a diplo-ma). Roughly 70,000 of these over-age, under-credited students arestill in school (the other 68,000 have dropped out altogether)—apopulation that, on its own, would be the nation’s sixth-largest highschool district. This student population is especially hard to reach.For such students, charter schools are ideally positioned to innovateand provide alternative educational options that work when the tra-ditional system fails.


110

For hard-to-reach students,

charter schools are ideally

positioned to innovate and

provide alternative educational

options that work when the

traditional system fails.

Idea 9: Harness charter school flexibility to create a viablecurriculum-development sector.Curricular standards in American K-12 education are a disgrace, aproblem which afflicts the charter schools every bit as much as tra-ditional district schools. There are a number of reasons for the lackof high-quality curricula—from abstract arguments over the natureof knowledge to the practical economics of the textbook industry—but the end result is the same.American students are not offereda well-developed curriculum, ineither the liberal arts or math andscience.

This defect creates an oppor-tunity for the charter school sectorto take advantage of its latitude forindependent action. Donors canhelp devise and distribute strong,content-based curricular materials, ones mapped to high standards,for charter schools to implement (materials which could easily beadopted by traditional district public schools). It is a crucial andoften-ignored component of K-12 education: curriculum is what youput between students and teachers.

Idea 10: Research the charter sector’s “known-unknowns.”Experts in school reform recognize a basic truth: there is a great dealthey know they do not know. Donors can substantially increase theknowledge base by supporting research into some of the charter sec-tor’s “known-unknowns.” One big question that experts in the fieldbelieve is ripe for much closer exploration:

• What makes great charter school leaders tick? It is widelyknown that in any charter school, especially a new start-up, acritical factor in its success—or failure—is the quality of itsleaders. For decades, private industry and the military havebeen using a well-honed set of techniques to pinpoint the char-acteristics of people effective in a given leadership role, andthen using that knowledge to do a dramatically better job ofrecruiting, selecting, and developing leaders. Donors couldfund a rigorous study, ideally conducted by researchers whohave developed similar models for Fortune 500 companies and

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Donors can help devise strong,

content-based curricular

materials, mapped to high

standards, for charter schools

to implement.

large government agencies, to identify the competencies thatdistinguish excellent charter school founders from others. Andthey could support a substantial effort to put the results in thehands of every charter school authorizer, board member, CMOstaffer, funder, and anyone else involved in finding the nextwave of great charter school leaders.

Of course, there are many other questions that require furtherresearch. Several examples might include:

• Why do charter school teachers unionize? What happens to theschools when they do? How do thin charter contracts compareto traditional teachers’ union contracts?

• How can authorizers close ineffective charters with minimalpain to students? What can states do to ensure that authorizersclose low-performing charters?

• How can charter schools become more productive by makingmore effective tradeoffs between teacher salaries and use ofinstructional technology?

Idea 11: Identify and cultivate a pool of charter-friendlypolicy leaders.At any given time, there are hundreds of positions of real influencewithin the American K-12 educational system. These include WhiteHouse educational specialists, Congressional staffers with a focus onK-12 education, and sub-cabinet officers at the U.S. Department ofEducation; special advisors to governors, state legislative commit-tees, and executives at state-level departments of education; execu-tive leaders at large, urban school districts; and key program officersat large, national foundations. Of course, the charter sector as awhole will be much better off if as many of these positions as possibleare filled by charter-friendly people with a keen focus on quality. Todate, however, there is no formal or informal system for tracking jobopenings and available, charter-friendly candidates. This has createda major strategic opening for donors to experiment with ways to keeptabs on positions of real policymaking influence—and the forward-thinking, charter-friendly candidates who should fill them.


112

Appendix A:Projects Referenced

Academy of Math and Science1557 W. Prince Rd.Tucson, AZ 85705520.293.2676amstucson.org

Achievement First790 E. New York Ave.Brooklyn, NY 11203718.774.0906achievementfirst.org

Alain Locke Charter Academy3141 W. Jackson Blvd.Chicago, IL 60612773.265.7230alainlocke.org

All Children Matter146 Monroe Center, NWSuite 900Grand Rapids, MI 49503616.776.5440allchildrenmatter.org

Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools2023 S. Union Ave.Los Angeles, CA 90007213.943.4930laalliance.org

American Enterprise Institute1150 17th St., NWWashington, DC 20036202.862.5800aei.org

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Amistad Academy407 James St.New Haven, CT 06513203.773.0390achievementfirst.org

Aspire Public Schools1001 22nd Ave.Oakland, CA 94606510.434.5000aspirepublicschools.org

Atlantic Legal Foundation2039 Palmer Ave.Suite 104Larchmont, NY 10538914.834.3322atlanticlegal.orgdefendcharterschools.org

Beginning with Children Charter School11 Bartlett St.Brooklyn, NY 11206718.388.8847bwccschool.org

Black Alliance for Educational Options888 16th St., NWSuite 800Washington, DC 20006202.429.2236baeo.org

Bright Star Schools2636 Mansfield Ave.Los Angeles, CA 90016323.954.9957brightstarschools.org


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Brighter Choice Charter School (For Girls)250 Central Ave.Albany, NY 12206518.694.4100brighterchoice.org

Brighter Choice Charter School (For Boys)116 North Lake Ave.Albany, NY 12206518.694.8200brighterchoice.org

Broad Residency in Urban Education10900 Wilshire Blvd.Los Angeles, CA 90024310.954.5080broadresidency.org

Building Charter School Quality ConsortiumHoover Institution434 Galvez MallStanford, CA 94305650.725.3431bcsq.org

Building Excellent Schools Fellowship262 Washington St.7th FloorBoston, MA 02108617.227.4545buildingexcellentschools.org

Building Hope910 17th St., NWSuite 1100Washington, DC 20006202.457.1999buildinghope.org

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P r o j e c t s R e f e r e n c e d

California Charter Schools Association250 E. 1st St.Suite 1000Los Angeles, CA 90012213.244.1446myschool.org

Center City Public Charter Schools7 New York Ave., NESuite 300Washington, DC 20002202.589.0202centercitypcs.org

Center for Education Reform910 17th St., NWSuite 1120Washington, DC 20006800.521.2118edreform.com

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)Hoover Institution434 Galvez MallStanford, CA 94305650.725.3431credo.stanford.edu

Cesar Chavez School Network2500 W. 18th St.Pueblo, CO 81003719.295.1623ccschoolnetwork.org

Chandler Preparatory Academy1251 E. Southern Ave.Tempe, AZ 85282480.839.3402chandlerprep.org


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Chicago International Charter School228 S. Wabash Ave.Suite 500Chicago, IL 60604312.651.5000chicagointl.org

Civic Builders160 BroadwayEast BuildingSuite 900New York, NY 10038212.571.7260civicbuilders.org

Colorado League of Charter Schools725 S. BroadwaySuite 7Denver, CO 80209303.989.5356coloradoleague.org

Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN)85 Willow St.Suite ANew Haven, CT 06511203.772.4017conncan.org

Core Knowledge Foundation801 E. High St.Charlottesville, VA 22902434.977.7550coreknowledge.org

Credit Enhancement Program of the U.S. Department of Education400 Maryland Ave., SWWashington, DC 20202800.USA.LEARNed.gov/programs/charterfacilities/index.html

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DC Preparatory Academy707 Edgewood St., NEWashington, DC 20017202.645.4590dcprep.org

Democrats for Education Reform24 W. 46th St.Suite 4New York, NY 10036212.763.8922dfer.org

District of Columbia Charter School Special Education Cooperative1488 Newton St., NWWashington, DC 20010202.903.6883dcchartercoop.org

ECO ProgramAlliant International University10455 Pomerado Rd.San Diego, CA 92131858.635.4000alliant.edu

Education for Change303 Hegenberger Rd.Suite 301Oakland, CA 94621510.568.7936efcps.org

Education Pioneers300 Frank H. Ogawa PlazaSuite 232Oakland, CA 94612510.893.4374educationpioneers.org


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Education Reform Now24 W. 46th St.Suite 4New York, NY 10036212.763.8922

Education Sector1201 Connecticut Ave., NWSuite 850Washington, DC 20036202.552.2840educationsector.org

EdVoice Foundations, Inc.1107 9th St.Suite 730Sacramento, CA 95814916.448.3868edvoice.org

Excellence Boys Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant225 Patchen Ave.Brooklyn, NY 11233718.638.1830uncommonschools.org

ExED11858 La Grange Ave.Second FloorLos Angeles, CA 90025310.394.1152exed.net

Thomas B. Fordham Institute1016 16th St., NW8th FloorWashington, DC 20036202.223.5452edexcellence.org

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Friendship Public Charter Schools120 Q St., NESuite 200Washington, DC 20002202.281.1700friendshipschools.org

Georgia Charter Schools Association600 W. Peachtree St., NWSuite 1555Atlanta, GA 30308404.835.8900gacharters.org

Great Hearts Academies2020 N. Arizona Ave.Suite G-62Chandler, AZ 85225480.899.9181greatheartsaz.org

Green Dot Public Schools350 S. Figueroa St.Suite 213Los Angeles, CA 90071213.621.0276greendot.org

Harlem Success Academy 134 W. 118th St.3rd FloorNew York, NY 10026646.277.7170harlemsuccess.org

Henry Ford Academy20900 Oakwood Blvd.P.O. Box 1148Dearborn, MI 48124313.982.6200hfacademy.org


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High Tech High2861 Womble Rd.San Diego, CA 92106619.243.5000hightechhigh.org

Houston A+ Challenge1415 Louisiana St., Box 9Suite 3250Houston, TX 77002713.658.1881houstonaplus.org

IDEA Public Schools505 Angelita Dr.Suite 9Weslaco, TX 78596956.377.8000ideapublicschools.org

Illinois Network of Charter Schools20 E. Jackson Blvd.Suite 1300Chicago, IL 60604312.235.0798incschools.org

Imagine Foundations Public Charter School4605 Brown Station Rd.Upper Marlboro, MD 20772301.952.8707imaginefoundationspubliccharterschool.com

Imagine Schools1005 N. Glebe Rd.Suite 610Arlington, VA 22201703.527.2600imagineschools.com

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Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools5150 W. Goldleaf Cir.Suite 401Los Angeles, CA 90056323.290.6900icefla.org

Inner-City Teaching Corps (ICTC)Execution in Entrepreneurial Schools Leadership (ExSL) ProgramUNITEVolunteer Teaching Corps300 N. Elizabeth St.Suite 300CChicago, IL 60607312.491.9100ictc-chicago.org

Innovative Schools Development Corporation100 W. 10th St.Suite 403Wilmington, DE 19801302.656.4737innovativeschools.org

Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)KIPP Fisher Fellowship345 Spear St.Suite 510San Francisco, CA 94105415.399.1556kipp.org

Leadership Public Schools2601 Mission St.9th FloorSan Francisco, CA 94110415.695.0669leadps.org


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Learning Well29 E. Vermont St.Suite 300Indianapolis, IN 46202317.472.1473learningwellinc.org

LEARN Charter School1132 S. Homan Ave.Chicago, IL 60624773.826.6330learncharter.org

Lighthouse Academies1661 Worcester Rd.Suite 207Framingham, MA 01701508.626.0901lighthouse-academies.org

Lighthouse Community Charter School345 12th St.Oakland, CA 94607510.271.8801lighthousecharter.org

Local Initiatives Support Corporation501 Seventh Ave.New York, NY 10018212.455.9800lisc.org

Los Angeles Parents Unionparentrevolution.org

Mastery Charter Schools35 S. Fourth St.Philadelphia, PA 19106215.922.1902masterycharter.org

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Mastery Learning Institute3112 SE Main St.Portland, OR 97214503.236.9326home.teleport.com/~carthur/

Mind Trust407 N. Fulton St.Suite 102Indianapolis, IN 46202317.822.8102themindtrust.org

Missouri Charter Public School Association3908 Bell St.Kansas City, MO 64111816.456.0526mocharterschools.org

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools1101 14th St., NWSuite 801Washington, DC 20005202.289.2700publiccharters.org

National Association of Charter School Authorizers105 W. Adams St.Suite 1430Chicago, IL 60603312.376.2300qualitycharters.org

National Charter School Research ProjectUniversity of Washington2101 N. 34th St.Suite 195Seattle, WA 98103206.685.2214ncsrp.org


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New City Public Schools1230 Pine Ave.Long Beach, CA 90813562.436.0689thenewcityschool.org

New Leaders for New Schools30 W. 26th St.2nd FloorNew York, NY 10010646.792.1070nlns.org

New Schools for New Orleans200 Broadway St.Suite 108New Orleans, LA 70118504.274.3619newschoolsforneworleans.org

New Visions for Public Schools320 W. 13th St.6th FloorNew York, NY 10014212.645.5110newvisions.org

New York City Center for Charter School Excellence111 BroadwaySuite 604New York, NY 10006212.437.8300nycchartercenter.org

Noble Network of Charter Schools1010 N. Noble St.Chicago, IL 60622773.278.6895noblenetworkcmo.org

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Orange County High School of the Arts1010 N. Main St.Santa Ana, CA 92701714.560.0900ocsarts.net

Pacific Charter School Development316 W. 2nd St.Suite 900Los Angeles, CA 90012213.542.4700pacificcharter.org

Partners for Developing Futures350 Interlocken Blvd.Suite 390Broomfield, CO 80021303.217.8340partnersdevelopingfutures.org

Partnerships to Uplift Communities111 N. First St.Suite 100Burbank, CA 91502818.559.7699pucschools.org

Perspectives Charter Schools601 S. La Salle St.Suite 700Chicago, IL 60605773.358.6105perspectivescs.org

Progressive Policy Institute600 Pennsylvania Ave., SESuite 400Washington, DC 20003202.546.0007ppionline.org


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Rice Education Entrepreneurship ProgramJesse H. Jones Graduate School of ManagementJanice and Robert McNair HallRice UniversityHouston, TX 77252713.348.4341jonesgsm.rice.edu

Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators (RISE)2601 Mission St.Suite 902San Francisco, CA 94110415.821.7473risenetwork.org

Rocketship Education550 Kingsley Ave.Palo Alto, CA 94301408.286.3330rsed.org

Success Charter Network34 W. 118th St.2nd FloorNew York, NY 10026646.277.7170harlemsuccess.org

Teach For America315 W. 36th St.7th FloorNew York, NY 10018800.832.1230teachforamerica.org

Teacher U99 University Pl.Seventh FloorNew York, NY 10003212.228.1888teacheru.org

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TeachNOLA200 Broadway St.Suite 108New Orleans, LA 70118504.274.3605teachnola.org

Tennessee Charter Schools Association511 Union St.Suite 740Nashville, TN 37219615.248.6401tncharterschools.org

The New Teacher Project186 Joralemon St.Suite 300Brooklyn, NY 11201718.233.2800tntp.org

Uncommon Schools, Inc.826 Broadway7th FloorNew York, NY 10003212.844.3584uncommonschools.org

UNO Charter School Network954 W. Washington Blvd.Third FloorChicago, IL 60607312.432.6301unocharterschools.org

U.S. Chamber of Commerce1615 H St., NWWashington, DC 20062202.659.6000uschamber.com


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Victory Schools111 W. 57th St.Suite 525New York, NY 10019212.786.7900victoryschools.com

YES Prep Public Schools6201 Bonhomme Rd.Suite 168NHouston, TX 77036713.574.7600yesprep.org

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Appendix B:Funders Referenced

Achelis & Bodman Foundations767 Third Ave.4th FloorNew York, NY 10017212.644.0322foundationcenter.org/grantmaker/achelis-bodman/

Ahmanson Foundation9215 Wilshire Blvd.Beverly Hills, CA 90210310.278.0770theahmansonfoundation.org

Amar Foundation1760 The AlmedaSuite 300San Jose, CA 95126408.977.7090

Beginning with Children Foundation575 Lexington Ave.Suite 33New York, NY 10022212.750.9320bwcf.org

Brighter Choice Foundation116 N. Lake Ave.Albany, NY 12206518.694.4115brighterchoicefoundation.org

Boston Foundation75 Arlington St.Suite 10Boston, MA 02116617.338.1700tbf.org


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Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation1241 N. Franklin PlaceMilwaukee, WI 53202414.291.9915bradleyfdn.org

Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation10900 Wilshire Blvd.Suite 1200Los Angeles, CA 90024310.954.5050broadfoundation.org

California Community Foundation445 S. Figueroa St.Suite 3400Los Angeles, CA 90071213.413.4130calfund.org

Annie E. Casey Foundation701 St. Paul St.Baltimore, MD 21202410.547.6600aecf.org

Challenge Foundation16415 Addison Rd.Suite 157Dallas, TX 75248challengefoundation.org

Charter School Growth Fund350 Interlocken Blvd.Suite 390Broomfield, CO 80021303.217.8090chartergrowthfund.org

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F u n d e r s R e f e r e n c e d

CityBridge Foundation600 New Hampshire Ave., NWWashington, DC 20037citybridgefoundation.org

Clark Foundationclarkfoundation.org

Cosmos Foundation, Inc.9431 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. S.Houston, TX 77099713.343.3333cosmostx.org

Daniels Fund101 Monroe St.Denver, CO 80206720.941.4422danielsfund.org

Michael & Susan Dell FoundationP.O. Box 163867Austin, TX 78716msdf.org

Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Inc.9292 N. Meridian St.Suite 304Indianapolis, IN 46260317.846.7111rmfairbanksfoundation.org

Doris & Donald Fisher Fund1 Maritime PlazaSuite 1550San Francisco, CA 94111415.733.9721


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Ford Motor Company FundFord Motor CompanyP.O. Box 6248Dearborn, MI 48126800.392.3673ford.com/our-values/ford-fund-community-service

Henry Ford Museum20900 Oakwood Blvd.Dearborn, MI 48124313.982.6220hfmgv.org

Gates Family Foundation3575 Cherry Creek North Dr.Suite 100Denver, CO 80209gatesfamilyfoundation.org

Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationP.O. Box 23350Seattle, WA 98102206.709.3100gatesfoundation.org

Greater New Orleans FoundationK&B Plaza1055 St. Charles St.Suite 100New Orleans, LA 70130gnof.org

Charles Hayden Foundation140 Broadway51st FloorNew York, NY 10005212.785.3677charleshaydenfoundation.org

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Heinz Endowments30 Dominion Tower625 Liberty Ave.Pittsburgh, PA 15222412.281.5777heinz.org

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation2121 Sand Hill Rd.Menlo Park, CA 94025650.234.4500hewlett.org

Houston Endowment Inc.600 Travis St.Suite 6400Houston, TX 77002713.238.8100houstonendowment.org

Jaquelin Hume Foundation600 Montgomery St.Suite 2800San Francisco, CA 94111415.705.5115

Hyde Family Foundations17 W. PontotocSuite 200Memphis, TN 38103901.685.3400hydefamilyfoundations.org

James Irvine Foundation575 Market St.Suite 3400San Francisco, CA 94105415.777.2244irvine.org


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Joyce Foundation70 W. Madison St.Suite 2750Chicago, IL 60602312.782.2464joycefdn.org

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation4801 Rockhill Rd.Kansas City, MO 64110816.932.1000kauffman.org

Kern Family FoundationW305 S4239 Brookhill Rd.Waukesha, WI 53189262.968.6838kffdn.org

Marcus Foundation1266 W. Paces Ferry Rd.Suite 615Atlanta, GA 30327404.240.7700

MCJ and Amelior Foundation310 South St.Morristown, NJ 07960973.540.9148

Newark Charter School Fund59 Lincoln ParkSuite 300Newark, NJ 07102973.733.2285ncsfund.org

NewSchools Venture Fund49 Stevenson St.Suite 575San Francisco, CA 94105415.615.6860newschools.org

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Prudential Financial1 Corporate Dr.Shelton, CT 06484prudential.com

Pumpkin Foundation575 Lexington Ave.Suite 33rd FNew York, NY 10022

Riordan Foundation10900 Wilshire Blvd.Suite 320Los Angeles, CA 90024310.824.1570

Robertson Foundationrobertsonfoundation.org

Robin Hood Foundation826 Broadway9th FloorNew York, NY 10003robinhood.org

Rodel Charitable Foundation6720 N. Scottsdale Rd.Suite 380Scottsdale, AZ 85253480.367.2920rodelfoundationaz.org

Rodel Foundation of Delaware100 W. 10th St.Suite 704Wilmington, DE 19801302.504.5241rodelfoundationde.org

Rogers Family Foundation10 Clay St.Suite 200Oakland, CA 94607510.899.7930

Ronald Simon Family Foundation620 Newport Center Dr.12th FloorNewport Beach, CA 92660949.270.3644rmsff.org

Sallie Mae Fund12061 Bluemont WayReston, VA 20190703.810.3000thesalliemaefund.org

The Reinvestment Fund718 Arch St.Suite 300 NorthPhiladelphia, PA 19106215.574.5800trfund.com

Tiger Foundation101 Park Ave.New York, NY 10178212.984.2565tigerfoundation.org

Victoria Foundation946 Bloomfield Ave.Glen Ridge, NJ 07028973.748.0016victoriafoundation.org

Walton Family FoundationP.O. Box 2030Bentonville, AR 72712479.464.1570waltonfamilyfoundation.org

Weingart Foundation1055 W. 7th St.Suite 3050Los Angeles, CA 90017213.688.7799weingartfnd.org


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The Philanthropy RoundtableThe Philanthropy Roundtable is a national association of individualdonors, corporate giving officers, and foundation trustees and staff.The Roundtable attracts philanthropists who benefit from beingpart of an organization dedicated to helping them achieve theircharitable objectives. In addition to offering expert advice and coun-sel, the Roundtable puts donors in touch with peers who share sim-ilar concerns and interests. Members of the Roundtable gain accessto a donor community interested in philanthropic strategies andprograms that actually work.

MissionThe mission of The Philanthropy Roundtable is to foster excellencein philanthropy, to protect philanthropic freedom, to assist donorsin achieving their philanthropic intent, and to help donors advanceliberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility in America andabroad.

Guiding Principles• Philanthropic freedom is essential to a free society.

• A vibrant private sector is critical for generating the wealth thatmakes philanthropy possible.

• Voluntary private action offers solutions for many of society’smost pressing challenges.

• Excellence in philanthropy is measured by results, not goodintentions.

• A respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity.

Ab o u t T h e P h i l a n t h r o p y R o u n d t a b l e


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Donor Services

Annual MeetingThe Annual Meeting is The Philanthropy Roundtable’s flagshipevent. Donors from across the country meet to share ideas, strate-gies, and best practices, and hear from America’s premier experts inprivate innovation and forward-thinking policy.

Regional MeetingsThe Roundtable’s programs and services for donors include region-al meetings and dinners, held in different cities throughout the year,that bring donors together to discuss issues of common concern.Many donors find that these smaller, more intimate meetings enablethem to better network with peers who share similar interests.

PhilanthropyThe Roundtable’s quarterly magazine is “must reading” amongdonors committed to freedom, opportunity, and personal responsi-bility. Each issue offers donors insights on topics of significance inthe philanthropic world, focuses on broad strategic questions in linewith our principles, and provides real guidance and clear examplesof effective philanthropy.

GuidebooksThe Roundtable’s guidebooks are in-depth examinations of the prin-cipled and practical aspects of charitable giving. Our guidebooksconnect donors with the best information available for achievingphilanthropic excellence. The Roundtable publishes new guide-books every year and maintains a library of past publications formembers to access.

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Alliance for Charitable ReformThe Roundtable works on Capitol Hill and around the country to pro-tect the freedom and diversity of philanthropic organizations. OurAlliance for Charitable Reform has played a critical role in stoppingthe enactment of legislation harmful to grantmaking foundations.

Breakthrough GroupsThe Philanthropy Roundtable’s Breakthrough Groups on K-12Education, Conservation,HigherEducation,National Security, andHelping People to Help Themselves—all subjects where we thinkphilanthropy can achieve dramatic breakthroughs over the nextdecade.

Consulting and Referral ServicesMembers of the Roundtable benefit from the insights and experi-ence of their peers. Many of our members have agreed to serve asinformal advisors to their Roundtable colleagues. To fulfill donorinterests outside of the scope of our mission and activities, theRoundtable collaborates with other philanthropic-service organiza-tions or refers donors directly to other experts.

Do n o r S e r v i c e s

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The Philanthropy Roundtable welcomes individual donors, foun-dations, corporations, donor-advised funds, venture philanthropypartnerships, and other grantmaking organizations as Members.To be eligible for membership, donors must give at least $50,000annually to charitable causes.Suggested annual contributions begin at a modest level in

order to encourage broad participation. However, the Roundtabledepends on larger donations or grants for its continuing opera-tions and programming. While the amount of the annual contri-bution is left to the discretion of each donor, members are asked tobe as generous as possible in supporting the Roundtable in fur-thering philanthropic excellence.

The Philanthropy Roundtable is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization under section501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.All contributions are fully tax-deductible.

Select aMembership Level: Please detach this page and include with your payment.

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NAME

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ADDRES S

C I T Y S TATE Z I P

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MR.MRS.MS.

Becoming a Member

Check the one that best describes you:� Individual Philanthropist� Private Foundation� Corporate Foundation� Community Foundation� Donor Advisor� Other_________________

Check all that interest you:� K-12 Education� National Security� Environmental Conservation� Higher Education� Social Services� Donor Intent� Other_________________

The Philanthropy Roundtable1150 17th Street, N.W., Suite 503,Washington, D.C. 20036

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Free copies of this guidebook are available to qualified donors.Nonprofit organizations may access a free pdf at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org.

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